Your Health vs. the Environment
In her new book, The Secret History of the War on Cancer, University of Pittsburgh's Devra Davis goes into the trenches to report on the lengthy "War on Cancer" and to access its failings, successes and the current status of the assault.
Story by Ann Curran
Devra Davis zips around her tiny office like a perpetual-motion machine. Director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and a professor in Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health, this slim, enthusiastic woman kicks off her patent-leather mules, puts a foot onto the desk, then onto the wall, and finally onto a nearby chair.
She moves constantly. It isn't just a physical thing. The head is working just as fast. She grabs a book to illustrate the latest thinking on a topic. She turns and rustles through a file for more evidence. For a moment, she settles cross-legged in a yoga pose on her office chair. Then she rushes from the room to have copies made. She doesn't wait for an interview to begin with a question: She heads right into what she wants to talk about.
And it's not about her latest book and focus for this article, The Secret History of the War on Cancer. Davis doesn't talk about her Clinton administration appointment either, her work for the World Health Organization or even her sharing in the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for her work with the U.N. group. She talks about family. She lost both parents to cancer: Harry B. Davis and Jean Langer Davis.
Davis, 61, still has lots of family in the Pittsburgh area. Her home now is in Washington, D.C., with husband Richard Morgenstern, an economist and senior fellow at Resources for the Future and former deputy administrator at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She rents a flat in Shadyside. They have a son, Aaron Morgenstern, 31, a manager for a wholesale-food company in Washington; a daughter, Lea Davis Morgenstern, 28, a paralegal in California; a grandson, Davis; a granddaughter, Josephine; and a newborn granddaughter, Raleigh.
In her book, she points out that the "War on Cancer" has concentrated on finding and treating cancer while ignoring some of the things that cause it. In addition, the book alleges there has been a conflict of interest for the industries that produce products said to cause cancer and the research these companies fund. It's a practice that continues to this day. Davis comments on many of the everyday encounters people have that could pose a health risk - cell phones, cosmetics, cleaning products and job-related hazards, to name a few. For the past eight months, Davis has promoted her book in interviews, lectures and book signings across the country and internationally.
"Twenty years ago," she says, "nobody would have listened... I think we've matured." Her hometown of Donora, 20 miles down the Monongahela from Pittsburgh, was often darkened by pollution spewing from steel mills and zinc works. It has long preyed on this scientist, no doubt because of the cancer deaths of family members. She sees "the cancer patterns that we face today where one in two men and one in three women have been diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime [as a] statistic that compels us to change our patterns and lifestyles." As a Jew, she says she takes seriously a religious principle, tikkun olan, which she translates as "to heal the world... leave the world better than you found it."
Despite her good intentions, Davis has not had everyone concur with her findings in The Secret History of the War on Cancer. In fact, the book has received some negative reviews. One writer from The Lancet, a medical journal, expressed concern about the accuracy of the book. The writer is director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), which is criticized in the book. Davis mentions a former IARC director who objected to the chummy link between the cell-phone industry and those studying brain cancer connected with cell-phone use.
In a review that appeared in The Pump Handle, a blog focusing on public health and the environment, Boston University School of Public Health professor Richard Clapp applauds Davis' revelations, saying her book raises vital issues that remain relevant today.
Davis also poses questions such as: Are cell phones really safe? Should mammograms be so widely used? Why are cosmetics and personal-care products basically free to contain anything? What poisons do you have sitting around the house that you might find a safer substitute for? Is anybody looking out for us? Is anybody saving us from ourselves?
You don't have to be a scientist to learn more about these issues Davis raises or to read The Secret History of the War on Cancer; it's easily accessible to the lay reader.
From Donora to Squirrel Hill and beyond
To hear Davis tell the story of her intellectual journey, her academic life began at Taylor Allderdice High School in Squirrel Hill. At 14, Davis had moved with her family to that Pittsburgh neighborhood from Donora, where her father was a brigadier general in the Pennsylvania National Guard and worked in the mills as a chemist and machinist. He became a businessman in Pittsburgh while her mother, a homemaker, earned a degree in women's studies at Pitt. Donora, however, remained on her radar: Its 1948 smog that killed 20 and sickened half of the town became the impetus for her 2002 book, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution.
For Davis, "School was not like school for me. It was a candy land." She found her Allderdice English teacher Wayne Sommerfeld amazing. "We used to fight all the time," she says of their debates on conflicting ideas. "If you have someone to fight with, it really helps you to sharpen your skills." By the time she finished her sophomore year in high school, her teachers sent her to the University of Pittsburgh to take courses while still attending high school. When she graduated from Allderdice, she was already a junior at Pitt. She earned a B.S. in physiological psychology and an M.A. in sociology at 20.
At that point, she recalls her mother warning her, "'You had better stop now, or you won't get a husband.'" Davis did not heed that advice and continued full speed ahead. She went on to the University of Chicago and earned a doctorate in science studies. That was followed by a master's of public health in epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University. As a seasoned academic, Davis can back up whatever she speaks about or writes about with plenty of support.
Her reference to a "War on Cancer" harkens back to President Richard Nixon's war on cancer, declared in 1971. Her book takes the reader behind the scenes to the often deadly battlefields that, she maintains, slowed the war down and literally left many dead - unnecessarily. "We were fighting the wrong war because we were only focusing on finding and treating the disease and ignoring things that we knew caused it - like smoking, benzene, asbestos, radiation," says Davis, stating the main theme of her book.
Davis notes that the medical community has made real progress in "finding and treating the disease." However, unless prevention occurs, people will continue to die and the system could be swamped financially. "The direct cost of cancer alone is $100 billion a year."
If Davis were the general, the war on cancer would continue to emphasize diagnosis and treatment, which has seen some success, with some 10 million cancer survivors across the United States alone. In addition, she would pay much more attention to all the other things that cause cancer as well as the positive things people can do to improve their health. In the following section, Davis comments on some of the possible causes of cancer.
On Asbestos
Davis claims there are 35 million attics in the United States today that may have an insulation called Zonolite, which contains tremolite, a form of asbestos. The authors of one study also raised the crayon scare. Many brands of crayons used a talc containing asbestos. In a pattern first set by the tobacco industry, the companies denied the claim, hired researchers who found the crayons safe, and continued producing them. Only after government scientists confirmed the asbestos contamination was a change made about a decade ago.
Between 2000 and 2006, the United States imported three times the amount of asbestos from Mexico, China and South America than it had previously. It turns up in car brakes, potting soil, kitty litter and insulation. Most industrial countries, including the European Union, Japan and Saudi Arabia, have banned asbestos.
"Canada is still exporting asbestos [a naturally occurring mineral] to India, where young kids are working without any protective equipment to make yarn and things that we know are going to cause them to die in 20 or 30 years."