"Losing the War Against Cancer! Who is responsible?
So the suggestion made by Don or Peter and other "lifestyle" advocates, that if you get cancer it's really your own fault, you smoked too much or you ate too much or you spent too much time in the sun, which is also the position of societies all over the world, not excluding New Zealand, so essentially we're faced with a situation of overall increase in incidence and mortality. These increases are affecting a very wide range of organs over and above those associated with smoking. Now alarming as these figures are in general they are grossly understated when you come to look at certain segments of the population. As Peter Bunyard mentioned people who are poor are at greater risk to a wider range of cancer. In the United States we don't report cancer in terms of socio-economic groups like we do in GB. You have 4-5 groups in GB and if you look at mortality rates the lower socio-economic groups are distinctly much higher than middle and upper socio-economic groups. I think these are most important as they reflect a variety of factors especially occupation and proximity of residence to polluting industries which are among the characteristics of the lower socio-economic group. Other high groups are all of you when you reach the age group 55-60 and this is an expression of the fact that in the course of your life you are exposed to a variety of carcinogens. The latency of these carcinogens, the time taken for these to produce their effects, can extend up to several decades. So the cancer of today reflects the exposure, not of yesterday, but of decades age. Other high risk groups are children, especially those whose parents work in a wide range of industry and also children of parents who have used pesticides in their home during or before actual pregnancy. Now, having stated the first leg of the facts, namely that cancer worldwide is increasing at alarming rates, let me simply reiterate that there are unequivocal data which have been assembled and systematised by leading international experts. Statistics in epidemiology which were published in a volume of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1990,91 edited by Denver Davis from the National Academy of Sciences which examined international cancer rates and came to several conclusions. Firstly that there alarming rates of increase in cancer rates internationally, tobacco cannot account for the majority of these increases. They also pointed out that there's a major increases in cancer rates of farmers, a very wide range of cancer rates in farmers. If you examine the annual changes, the annual increases in cancer rates, the percentage increase for different nations, New Zealand beats the lot.
The average increase per annum in cancer mortality rates in New Zealand 1968-86 are 1.1% per annum which was twice the rate of GB and twice the rate of Australia.
Page 3