"Losing the War Against Cancer! Who is responsible? What to do about it"
A lecture held at the Auckland Medical School, New Zealand 17th March 1993. Introduction by Simon Reeves
Sam Epstein has been a long campaigner, he attended the Stockholm Conference in 1972 of the United Nations, the first real governmental effort to examine what was happening to the environment scene around us. He's been a special adviser and remains a special adviser to Vice-Presidential candidate R Gore in respect of pesticides and has assisted him in the writing of reports. He's been at the forefront of the efforts by Vietnam veterans to obtain recompense and compensation for the insidious use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and he will I hope tell us about the extraordinary and lengthy attempts made to obtain compensation. He's an author, he's a critic and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Health in Great Britain. He's a Fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences, he's the author "The Politics of Cancer" and the co-author of "Hazardous Wastes in America". Like Peter Bunyard he's Assistant Editor of "The Ecologist". And from tonight's point of view he's also President of the Rachael Carson Trust in Washington DC.
The Epstein Lecture
I will begin by reporting a call from a lady in Sheffield, she's leading a campaign against diazinon, a component of sheep dip, and she told me that she has two problems stemming from this sheep dip. First of all some of the sheep, following the dip develop a wide range of health problems including what the farmers say is depression. How one diagnoses depression in sheep is not quite clear, but in addition to that some of the farmers, over and above the suicide question which has been raised, many of the farmers have been developing chronic neurobehavioural problems, and when the Ministry of Health ( of all the appropriate authorities) was contacted they said there's absolutely no basis for linkage for delayed neurobehavioural and neurotoxic problems and this particular organophosphate diazinon. Now, this denial by the Ministry of Health in England and the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries is par for the course. It reflects two sets of concerns. One is an overwhelming ignorance of the literature, and two is a basic bureaucratic inertia and recalcitrance and an automatic reflex denial on problems of causation.
"Losing the War Against Cancer! Who is responsible? What to do about it".