Exposing the big myth about cancer - non-hazards of 'environmental cancer' from industry - Column

"We did what scientists so often do, which was to use ... estimates without questioning them," said Marvin Schneiderman, a former National Cancer Institute statistician. There's one thing wrong with that statement. It should read, "We did what government regulatory scientists do." And it illustrates why NBC commentator John Chancellor is underscoring a disturbing reality when he wistfully says, "I can remember when you could win an argument by citing government statistics."

Government statistics are no longer trustworthy in such sensitive and significant matters as human health, cancer and the environment. For almost a generation, the American public has been the victim of a hoax, perpetrated by its own government, that cancer is caused by environmental factors, and particularly industry, and not by personal habits, primarily smoking.

But the myth of environmental cancer caused by industry now seems to have been laid to rest, among scientists at least, by perhaps its most important originator.

Marvin Schneiderman was one of nine contributors to what is known as the "estimates document," the report prepared in 1978 for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that launched America's great asbestos hoax. That document, using figures originally developed by the late Dr. Irving Selikoff, projected that 58,000 to 75,000 people would die each year from asbestos-related cancer -- about 17 percent of all cancer fatalities.

Based on that projection, the U.S. government upped the number of cancers presumably caused by industrial exposure from 2 percent to as much as 40 percent. The United States was in the middle of a cancer "epidemic" caused, Schneiderman told OSHA, by its own industrial civilization.

Ten years later, Schneiderman was the Environmental Protection Agency's principal scientific authority in what the agency hoped would be a precedent-setting ban on asbestos, which is used primarily as fire protection in buildings and in brake linings.

In November, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the ban when the EPA failed to make a case for even 13 to 15 asbestos-related cancer deaths a year, among heavily exposed brake workers.

EPA Administrator William Reilly, in the words of the National Association of School Boards, had provided Congress with "a broad indictment of the EPA's lack of scientific basis for its policy pronouncements." EPA's own Science Advisory Board asked Reilly why the scientific basis for the government's asbestos policy had never had "the benefit of review" by the board.

Why? And why did 58,000 to 75,000 asbestos-related cancer deaths eventually fall to 13 to 15 -- and those unprovable in court? The answer lies in environmental ideology, not in science.

Real scientists -- those private and government researchers who submit their work to peer review in professional journals -- can't be blamed. The estimates document was never submitted for peer review, and the contributors have never admitted actual authorship.

Denounced immediately by Science and the Lancet, the document also was castigated by Sir Richard Doll of Oxford University, the epidemiologist who conclusively proved the relationship between smoking and lung cancer, in a definitive study, The Causes of Cancer. "No arguments based, even loosely, upon [these estimates] should be taken seriously," wrote Doll. "It seems likely that whoever wrote the OSHA paper did so for political rather than scientific reasons ... [wishing] to emphasize the importance of occupational factors ... in newspaper articles and ... journalism."

Not all journalists were conned. In the mid-1980s, Edith Efron published The Apocalyptics, which was hailed by biochemist Bruce Ames of the University of California at Berkeley, the nation's leading authority on carcinogenesis, as the "Silent Spring of the counterrevolution."

By 1985, when I published a series of articles on asbestos in the Detroit News, it had become obvious, largely through the work of Malcolm Ross of the U.S. Geological Survey, that only heavy exposure among those working closely with asbestos -- with risks multiplied some 80 to 90 times by their smoking -- was dangerous.

Further, those dangers were largely in the past, primarily in the World War II era, when exposure was completely unregulated. Ross's conclusions were affirmed by the American Medical Association and by a study, commissioned by Congress, from the Health Effects Institute-Asbestos Research in Cambridge, Mass., whose chairman of the board is Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox.

"We made the inappropriate estimate that short-term exposures were just as nasty, as carcinogenic, and deadly as long-term exposures," Schneiderman said in an April issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. "Now it looks as if you have to have fairly continuous exposure to cause the worst effects."

So the great industrial cancer epidemic is over, as communities with the financial and intellectual resources to study the issue have already come to realize. Newton, Mass., with two biologists on its Board of Aldermen, rejected a $3.5 billion asbestos removal proposal last winter. An $8.5 million asbestos removal referendum was rejected in Canaan, Conn., in June by a vote of 2-to-1.