Is the CDC Covering Up the Cancer Threat in Great Lakes States?

While conservatives are arguing whether John McCain is conservative enough for them, they're not doing anything to reverse the course of one of the most destructive legacies of the Bush administration: the Republican war on science. To the demotions and muzzling of global warming scientists, we can now add a more immediate danger: the alleged Centers for Disease Control cover-up of a disturbing report showing millions of residents in eight Great Lake states facing environmental hazards that sharply raise the risk of infant mortality and deadly cancers. As reported today by Sheila Kaplan for the Center for Public Integrity:

For more than seven months, the nation's top public health agency has blocked the publication of an exhaustive federal study of environmental hazards in the eight Great Lakes states, reportedly because it contains such potentially "alarming information" as evidence of elevated infant mortality and cancer rates...

The Center for Public Integrity has obtained the [CDC] study, which warns that more than nine million people who live in the more than two dozen "areas of concern" -- including such major metropolitan areas as Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee -- may face elevated health risks from being exposed to dioxin, PCBs, pesticides, lead, mercury, or six other hazardous pollutants.

In many of the geographic areas studied, researchers found low birth weights, elevated rates of infant mortality and premature births, and elevated death rates from breast cancer, colon cancer, and lung cancer.

The Center's article goes on to report how political pressures apparently led the CDC to pull the report just days before a division of the agency was scheduled to release it. This week, the Center reports, in a letter to CDC director Dr. Julie Gerberding, "a trio of powerful congressional Democrats -- including Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee, chairman of the Committee on Science and Technology -- complained about the delay in releasing the report. The Center for Public Integrity obtained a copy of the letter to Gerberding, which notes that the full committee is reviewing "disturbing allegations about interference with the work of government scientists.'"

It's an abuse of federal research agencies that's in the same spirit as earlier Bush administration efforts to bury and ignore inconvenient scientific truths. And it's an issue that ought to be part of the Democratic campaign as the candidates seek to reach out to Midwestern voters: they not only face a higher risk of losing their jobs because of Republican budgetary and tax schemes, but, it seems, their lives as well because of the anti-regulatory, anti-scientific policies at work in this seeming CDC cover-up.

Comments

[WUC]

BILL COUZENS, FOUNDER LESSCANCER.ORG

As a Detroiter I have long been concerned about the numbers of family members and friends with cancer.

As a boy on my short block in Grosse Pointe Michigan a handful of our mothers had died of cancer by the time I had reached high school.
Looking back, I had often wondered if everyone got cancer?

I thought it odd then because my neighbors had cancer, did cancer run in all our families? Yes, it ran in our families, it ran in our neighborhoods.

When my sister died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago my first childhood friend from two doors away had died of lung cancer a year previous to my sister.

Both my sister and friend had died of cancer both at younger ages than our mothers.

While we may never find the smoking gun to Detroit's cancers scientists tell us that many of these environmental exposures linked to cancer are both unnecessary and preventable.

Sound science now tells us that two thirds of all cancer comes from outside of the body.

The environment of today is the proverbial mirror for human health. Our role is charged with reducing the unnecessary and preventable exposures that have taken on the everyday landscape in our own lives those known to cause cancer and those we suspect to have caused cancer.

We must look at the road to less cancer.
We must look to our environment where there are commonplace cancer causing environmental exposures especially those that are both preventable and unnecessary.

[WUC]

BILL COUZENS, FOUNDER LESSCANCER.ORG

As a Detroiter I have long been concerned about the numbers of family members and friends with cancer.

As a boy on my short block in Grosse Pointe Michigan a handful of our mothers had died of cancer by the time I had reached high school.

Looking back, I had often wondered if everyone got cancer?

I thought it odd then because my neighbors had cancer, did cancer run in all our families? Yes, it ran in our families, it ran in our neighborhoods.

When my sister died of pancreatic cancer a few years ago my first childhood friend from two doors away had died of lung cancer a year previous to my sister.

Both my sister and friend had died of cancer both at younger ages than our mothers.

While we may never find the smoking gun to Detroit's cancers scientists tell us that many of these environmental exposures linked to cancer are both unnecessary and preventable.

Sound science now tells us that two "thirds of all cancer comes from outside of the body.

The environment of today is the proverbial mirror for human health. Our role is charged with reducing the unnecessary and preventable exposures that have taken on the everyday landscape in our own lives those known to cause cancer and those we suspect to have caused cancer.

We must look at the road to less cancer. We must look to our environment where there are commonplace cancer causing environmental exposures especially those that are both preventable and unnecessary.

[Noelle]

Thanks for bringing some attention to this story. I grew up in a Cleveland, OH suburb and I have seen it first hand. My mother grew up in a town outside Cleveland but within a 20 minute drive to to downtown and was diagnosed with cancer at 38. She died at 48 and when I started making calls from her phonebook to old friends I was startled to find many of them had also passed on.

I started researching and found that 70% of her female graduating class had died of cancer before the age of 50. I researched further and found pockets of high cancer rates around the great lakes and some pockets in a few other areas of the country. I didn't need a study, I have my own daughters and decided to move. I don't know however if many other citizens of these communities know their risk is higher than other parts of the country and that is just wrong.

I don't know what is causing it but I do know it's real. My best friend stayed in Cleveland. She is 36 and was diagnoed with breast cancer in October.

[DemandTruth]

No wonder The Hammer Delay can go on TV and claim there's NO science on human contribution to climate change! They've got a LOCK DOWN on all the science! Impartial scientists who've been studying these things all their lives give a report which is instantly changed or covered-up by the know-nothing industry hacks in the administration and presto-chango! There's NO science! Looky here, let me make this simple for all you deniers out there. The planet Earth is a closed system. Go and find yourself a greenhouse, and stand outside of it. Then shout to the heavens - it is NOT HOT in that greenhouse! It is NOT HOTTER in that greenhouse, which is recieving the same amount of sunrays I am now, standing outside the greenhouse. It is NOT HOTTER in that greenhouse! Then take a step inside and experience the wonder of SCIENCE, you fools!

[LeftRight]

Sounds like the NASA study of flight safety, that they sat on for more than a year, because it might "make the public less confident about the safety of our airspace". My thought is, that I'd rather know if it's not safe, cause then I can make an informed decision, rather than trust them when they say that it's safe!

Man that's just disturbing, sorry, we can't tell you how unsafe you are, because then you might think that you're unsafe!

[letstakeawalk]

Well, I don't suppose the Detroit housing market could sink any lower. Why don't all ya'll in the mid-west move here to the southern coast where home insurance is impossible to buy because of hurricanes and tornadoes and the job market makes moving to Indonesia attractive...