"Losing the War Against Cancer! Who is responsible?
In fact there is a very substantive literature on neurobehavioural effects of organophosphates in general and diazinon in particular and the likelihood is that in the near future I will be paying a visit to GB to testify on this particular issue. For same strange reason the English don't seem to be able to find their way round the literature, which is somewhat odd.
The subject tonight is enormous. I would like to focus attention on breast cancer, in part because of Peter Bunyard's reference to it and radiation, and the fact that in the United States we're seeing the shift in decision making, or a sharing of power from the usual alliance of the so-called medical and cancer establishment and governmental agencies, to grass roots movements. In the first instance in the AIDS and the Acta group which was the forerunner of the first real empowerment of grassroot individuals in decision making who are, and the AIDS groups who are basically calling some of the shots in decision making in health policy in the US. And far more recently a loose collaboration, coalition of heterogeneous group of woman who have formed a national coalition to fight breast cancer. For that reason among others it is useful to describe what is happening in breast cancer.
If in a very short space of time a group of activists, the AIDS and the women's breast cancer group have been able to effect major shifts in Federal policies in health, there's absolutely no reason why groups such as are represented here this evening, could not, using appropriate strategies, could not achieve similar shifts in empowerment in the area of pesticides use in general and public health in particular.
The facts are in all major industrial states the cancer rates are escalating to epidemic proportions: 1 in 3 people get cancer in most major industrialised nations including the US, GB and New Zealand. One in four die from it. In the United States 5,400 people died last year from cancer. (Note from Chris Wheeler – this must be at least 54,000. 6,000 people per year die from cancer in New Zealand alone and 42,000 in Australia, both with smaller populations.) These are overall rates, when you break it down into different organs you find the cancer rates are increasing and the size of the increase depends on the particular organ but one point should be raised. If you subtract lung cancer rates, incidence and mortality rates from all other rates you find that the overall contribution that lung cancer itself makes to the overall mortality is in between 1/3 and 1/4.
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