The Secret History of the War on Cancer
Author: Devra Davis
From the National Book Award finalist, author of When Smoke Ran Like Water, a searing, haunting and deeply personal account of the War on Cancer.
The War on Cancer set out to find, treat, and cure a disease. Left untouched were many of the things known to cause cancer, including tobacco, the workplace, radiation, or the global environment. Proof of how the world in which we live and work affects whether we get cancer was either overlooked or suppressed.
This has been no accident.
The War on Cancer was run by leaders of industries that made cancer-causing products, and sometimes also profited from drugs and technologies for finding and treating the disease. Filled with compelling personalities and never-before-revealed information,
The Secret History of the War on Cancer shows how we began fighting the wrong war, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong enemies-a legacy that persists to this day.
This is the gripping story of a major public health effort diverted and distorted for private gain.
A portion of the profits from this book will go to support research on cancer prevention.
The Washington Post - David Oshinsky
While much of this may sound familiar to a moderately informed reader, Davis puts it together in a way that illuminates the underbelly of medical research…the best watchdogs are often the most obsessive, using shock and alarm as a prelude to discussion. And for many readers of The Secret History of the War on Cancer, I suspect, Devra Davis is a natural for this role.
Kirkus Reviews
Cancer remains such a prolific killer, says the author, because the medical community focuses on treatment rather than prevention of the root causes. Davis (When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution, 2002, etc.), an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Environmental Oncology at University of Pittsburgh's Cancer Institute, offers a detailed history of workplace and environmental carcinogens that predates Nixon's "war" on cancer in the '70s. She reminds us of Sir Percival Pott's observations of scrotal cancers in English chimney sweeps, the radiation-induced cancers that followed the discovery of X-rays, the Curies' work with radium and, less well-known, the research of Nazi scientists who linked tobacco to cancer and led officials to discourage Germans from smoking during World War II. The German scientists were pioneers in the new field of epidemiology, which even today is denigrated by some since it involves methods like surveys (unreliable) and statistics (suspect). Much of the text makes for grim but fascinating reading as Davis reviews the tobacco story and describes conditions in steel mills, copper smelters, chemical factories and plastics plants, where workers are exposed to insidious and lethal solvents and agents such as asbestos, benzene, formaldehyde and dioxin. She also immortalizes the many poor people in small towns next to waste dumps or downstream from hugely polluted rivers who died from cancer or whose children suffered birth defects. In almost every case, the offending corporation lied, denied, delayed or bought-off complaints, recruiting the best legal talent and, sad to say, even highly respected scientists.Rather than engage in what has been a fruitless battle of litigation, vengeance and counterproductive legislation, Davis proposes a kind of truth-and-reconciliation approach to get industry and public-health experts mutually involved. But she notes that, unfortunately, it's simply not happening fast enough, and she goes on to raise her own concerns about cell phones, Ritalin and aspartame. One can hope, however, that Davis's book will assure that proper attention is paid.
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Against Depression
Author: Peter D Kramer
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