3. The lecture on "Silent Spring" made me interested in looking on some recent statistics about cancer rates which I found at the website of the US National Cancer Institute. Interestingly the statistics are speaking for a steady decline in cancer rates since 1992. Of course there are some differences within the general decline like the rates of lung cancer. However, altogether the rise in cancer which constructed resulted out of the large-scale release of new chemicals seems to be reversed.
This conclusion seems rational to me since all chemicals released are getting distributed more evenly by time and partly stay in areas where they are virtually excluded from the human food chain etc. Just think about the DDT in rats or whatever.
I also found an article about the Chinese government and its dealing with rising breast cancer rates. Interestingly they blame changing life-style and unhealthy diet for the rise. Although I do not know the original article - which might at least draw a more significant indirect connection between pollution and cancer - I think the Chinese government tries to downplay the role of industrial pollution.
----------US Cancer Rates-------------
Annual Report to the Nation Finds Declines in Cancer Incidence and Death Rates; Special Feature Reveals Wide Variations in Lung Cancer Trends across States A new report from the nation's leading cancer organizations shows that, for the first time since the report was first issued in 1998, both incidence and death rates for all cancers combined are decreasing for both men and women, driven largely by declines in some of the most common types of cancer. The report notes that, although the decreases in overall cancer incidence and death rates are encouraging, large state and regional differences in lung cancer trends among women underscore the need to strengthen many state tobacco control programs. The findings come from the "Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975-2005, Featuring Trends in Lung Cancer, Tobacco Use and Tobacco Control", online Nov. 25, 2008, and appearing in the Dec. 2, 2008, Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Although cancer death rates have been dropping since the publication of the first Annual Report to the Nation 10 years ago, the latest edition marks the first time the report has documented a simultaneous decline in cancer incidence, the rate at which new cancers are diagnosed, for both men and women. Based on the long-term incidence trend, rates for all cancers combined decreased 0.8 percent per year from 1999 through 2005 for both sexes combined; rates decreased 1.8 percent per year from 2001 through 2005 for men and 0.6 percent per year from 1998 through 2005 for women. The decline in both incidence and death rates for all cancers combined is due in large part to declines in the three most common cancers among men (lung, colon/rectum, and prostate) and the two most common cancers among women (breast and colon/rectum), combined with a leveling off of lung cancer death rates among women.
"The drop in incidence seen in this year's Annual Report is something we've been waiting to see for a long time," said Otis W. Brawley, M.D., chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society (ACS). "However, we have to be somewhat cautious about how we interpret it, because changes in incidence can be caused not only by reductions in risk factors for cancer, but also by changes in screening practices. Regardless, the continuing drop in mortality is evidence once again of real progress made against cancer, reflecting real gains in prevention, early detection, and treatment."
The new report shows that, from 1996 through 2005, death rates for all cancers combined decreased for all racial and ethnic populations and for both men and women, except for American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, for whom rates were stable. The drop in death rates has been steeper for men, who have higher rates, than for women. Death rates declined for 10 of the top 15 causes of cancer death among both men and women. However, death rates for certain individual cancers are increasing, including esophageal cancer for men, pancreatic cancer for women, and liver cancer for both men and women. Overall cancer death rates were highest for African-Americans and lowest for Asian American/Pacific Islanders.
Among men, incidence rates dropped for cancers of the lung, colon/rectum, oral cavity, and stomach. Prostate cancer incidence rates decreased by 4.4 percent per year from 2001 through 2005 after increasing by 2.1 percent per year from 1995 to 2001. In contrast, incidence rates increased for cancers of the liver, kidney, and esophagus, as well as for melanoma (2003-2005), non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and myeloma. Incidence rates were stable for cancers of the bladder, pancreas, and brain/nervous system, and for leukemia.
For women, incidence rates dropped for cancers of the breast, colon/rectum, uterus, ovary, cervix, and oral cavity but increased for cancers of the lung, thyroid, pancreas, brain/nervous system, bladder, and kidney, as well as for leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and melanoma.
"While we have made progress in reducing the burden of cancer in this country, we must accelerate our efforts, including making a special effort to reach underserved cancer patients in the communities where they live," said National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director John Niederhuber, M.D. "This report gives us a better understanding of where we may need to redouble our efforts and try to find new ways of preventing or reducing the occurrence of kidney, liver, and other cancers that continue to show increases in both mortality and/or incidence."
The Special Feature section of the Report highlights wide variations in tobacco smoking patterns across the United States, which, coupled with differences in smoking behaviors in younger versus older populations, helps explains the delay in an expected decrease in lung cancer deaths among women and a slowing of the decrease in lung cancer deaths among men.
The report finds substantial differences in lung cancer death rate trends by state and geographic region. For example, lung cancer death rates dropped an average of 2.8 percent per year among men in California from 1996 through 2005, more than twice the drop seen in many states in the Midwest and the South. The geographic variation is even more extreme among women, for whom lung cancer death rates increased from 1996 through 2005 in 13 states and decreased only in three. The report also notes that, in five states (Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Idaho), lung cancer incidence among women showed an increasing trend, whereas the mortality trend was level.
"It's very promising to see the progress we are making in our fight against cancer," said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Julie Gerberding, M.D. "Unfortunately, tobacco use continues to plague our country, and it's the primary reason why lung cancer continues to rob too many people of a long, productive, and healthy life. We must recommit ourselves to implementing tobacco control programs that we know work if we are truly going to impact the staggering toll of tobacco on our society."
Variation in smoking prevalence among the states is influenced by several factors, including public awareness of the harms of tobacco use, social acceptance of tobacco use, local tobacco control activities, and tobacco industry promotional activities targeted in a geographic area. The 13 states where lung cancer death rates for women are on the rise have higher percentages of adult female smokers, low excise taxes, and local economies that are traditionally dependent on tobacco farming and production. In contrast, California, which was the first state to implement a comprehensive, statewide tobacco control program, was the only state in the country to show declines in both lung cancer incidence and deaths in women.
According to a U.S. Surgeon General's report, cigarette smoking accounts for approximately 30 percent of all cancer deaths, with lung cancer accounting for 80 percent of the smoking-attributable cancer deaths. Other cancers caused by smoking include cancers of the oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, stomach, bladder, pancreas, liver, kidney, and uterine cervix and myeloid leukemia.
"We can see that, in areas of the country where smoking and tobacco use are entrenched in daily life, men and women continue to pay a price with higher incidence and death rates from many types of cancer. This type of geographic variation in smoking-related cancers is due to smoking behaviors, not regional environmental factors," said Betsy A. Kohler, M.P.H., executive director of the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR).
"The observed decrease in the incidence and death rates from all cancers combined in men and women overall and in nearly all racial and ethnic groups is highly encouraging," conclude the authors. "However, this must be seen as a starting point rather than a destination." They say a dual effort, combining better application of existing knowledge with ongoing research to improve prevention, early detection, and treatment will be needed to sustain and extend this progress into the future.
The study was conducted by scientists at the ACS, CDC, NCI, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, and the NAACCR.
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Annual Report Shows Overall Decline in U.S. Cancer Incidence and Death Rates; Feature Focuses on Cancers with Recent Increasing Trends
The rates for new cancer cases and deaths for all cancers combined continued to decline in the United States, according to a report released today which includes new data for the period between 1992 to 1998. The report is by the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR); the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS); the American Cancer Society (ACS); and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). A feature section of the report focuses on a dozen cancers whose overall rates are increasing. "This welcome news on declining rates underscores the incredible progress we've made against cancer, but it also reminds us that our fight is far from over," said Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. "It is clear that we must not only treat cancer, but beat this deadly disease. That is why we are aggressively promoting cancer-related research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)."HHS has proposed an increase of $514 million for cancer-related research at NIH in 2002, a 12 percent increase over current year spending.
The "Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1973-1998, Featuring Cancers with Recent Increasing Trends" is published in the June 6, 2001 (Vol. 93, Issue 11, pages 824-842), issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.* "These findings highlight the progress we've made against cancer but also underscore the critical need for research and for equitably applying what we already know to sustain this progress," said NCI Director Richard D. Klausner, M.D. The report shows that the incidence rate for all cancers combined -- the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 persons per year -- declined on average 1.1 percent per year between 1992 and 1998. This overall trend reversed a pattern of increasing incidence rates from 1973 to 1992. Most of the decline can be attributed to a 2.9 percent yearly decline in white males and a 3.1 percent yearly decline in black males. "I am most excited to see that rates of new cases of cancer declined in the 1990s for both black and white men. It will take time to tell, but this could be a sign that the disparities among racial and ethnic groups are lessening," said James S. Marks, M.D., director of CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. "More good news is the continuing fall in cancer death rates by 1.6 percent per year for men and 0.8 percent per year for women between 1992 to 1998," said John R. Seffrin, Ph.D., chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society. "Particularly welcome is that the largest decrease -- 2.5 percent per year -- occurred in black men, who bear the heaviest cancer burden." Overall cancer mortality declined 1.1 percent yearly for the period from 1992 to 1998. Four cancer sites -- lung, prostate, breast, and colorectum -- accounted for about 56 percent of all new cancer cases and were also the leading causes of cancer deaths for every racial and ethnic group, which includes white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic populations. Because these sites comprise over half of all cancer cases, they have a strong influence on overall cancer trends. Breast cancer makes up 16.3 percent of all cancer cases and accounts for 7.8 percent of all deaths due to cancer. Breast cancer death rates have continued to decline due to improvements in early detection and treatment. However, breast cancer incidence rates have increased by more than 40 percent from 1973 to 1998. One explanation for the increase in breast cancer incidence rates comes from analyses which indicate that more early stage disease is being diagnosed, suggesting that use of aggressive screening and early detection, primarily mammography, may account for part of this increase. "The extent to which other factors, such as more obesity and post-menopausal hormone use, may contribute to the increase is unknown," said Brenda K. Edwards, Ph.D., of NCI, final author of the report. A rise in the rate of stage II node-positive disease diagnosed in white women 50 to 64 years of age is a more recent observation, Edwards added. Prostate cancer, which accounts for 14.8 percent of all cases, saw a sharp increase in incidence rates starting in the late 1980s with the introduction of screening for Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA). Subsequently, however, rates have started to decline. Death rates have also declined in recent years. Much of the wide variation in prostate cancer incidence rates across the country can be attributed to differing rates of PSA screening, with geographic areas of high usage of PSA reporting high incidence rates, often the result of the discovery of clinically insignificant tumors. Lung cancer accounts for 29 percent of cancer deaths in the United States and 13.2 percent of the cases. Overall, lung cancer incidence rates decreased 1.6 percent per year between 1992 and 1998, due mainly to a decline of 2.7 percent per year in men and a leveling off of rates in women, both manifestations of reductions in tobacco smoking since the 1960s. Lung cancer mortality began to decrease in 1990 in men but an increase in mortality continued until at least 1998 in women. Long-term trends show that women have lagged behind men in lung cancer incidence and death rates. "Significantly, lung cancer death rates in women increased 0.8 percent per year but this rate of increase is slower than earlier periods," said Edward J. Sondik, Ph.D., director of CDC's NCHS. Colorectal cancer accounts for 11.6 percent of all cancer cases but incidence and death rates vary widely by race and ethnicity. Incidence rates for colorectal cancer ranged from 10.2 per 100,000 in the Hispanic population to 22.8 per 100,000 in the black population. Historically, incidence rates from colorectal cancer increased until 1985, then decreased 1.8 percent per year through 1995, and have stabilized through the latest reporting period in 1998. A long-term decrease in death rates in most populations began between 1992 and 1998 but remained stable in black females during this period. Detection of earlier stages of disease and more effective treatments have led to the decline in death rates seen in most populations. "Ten other cancers, in addition to the recent rise in female breast cancer incidence rates and the long-term increase in female lung cancer death rates, have increased in either incidence or death rates from 1992 to 1998. These 10 cancer sites together account for about 13 percent of all cancer cases and deaths," said Holly L. Howe, Ph.D., executive director of NAACCR, and senior author of this report. These diverse and relatively uncommon cancers include (in descending order of their contribution to total cancer deaths):
• Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma (4.4 percent of deaths, 4.0 percent of cases in 1998)
• Liver and intrahepatic bile duct (2.3 percent of deaths, 1.2 percent of cases in 1998)
• Esophagus (2.2 percent of deaths, 0.9 percent of cases in 1998)
• Melanoma (1.4 percent of deaths, 3.5 percent of cases in 1998)
• Acute Myeloid Leukemia (1.3 percent of deaths, 0.8 percent of cases in 1998)
• Soft (connective) Tissue including Heart (0.7 percent of deaths, 0.6 percent of cases in 1998)
• Thyroid (0.4 percent of deaths, 1.5 percent of cases in 1998)
• Small intestine (0.2 percent of deaths, 0.3 percent of cases in 1998)
• Vulva (0.1 percent of deaths, 0.3 percent of cases in 1998)
• Peritoneum, Omentum, and Mesentery (0.1 percent of deaths, 0.1 percent of cases in 1998) The report is based on incidence data from NCI's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program, the CDC's National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR), and NAACCR. Mortality data come from the CDC's NCHS. Authors of this report identified several strategies for reducing future incidence and death from cancer, the most critical being the reduction of tobacco use in all segments of the population, since smoking causes an estimated 30 percent of all cancer deaths. Another strategy would be to improve the use of currently effective but underutilized cancer screening tools. Other strategies identified include developing and applying state-of-the-art diagnostic tests and treatments, as well as identifying and reducing health disparities across diverse populations.
*The authors of this year's report are Holly L. Howe, Ph.D. (NAACCR), Phyllis A. Wingo, Ph.D. (CDC), Michael J. Thun, M.D. (ACS), Lynn A.G. Ries, M.S. (NCI), Harry M. Rosenberg, Ph.D. (CDC), Ellen G. Feigal, M.D. (NCI), and Brenda K. Edwards, Ph.D. (NCI).
# # #
For additional background on this report, a set of Questions and Answers can be found at: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/1998-annual-report-increasing-trends
For more information, visit the following Web sites:
SEER Homepage: http://www.seer.cancer.gov (This site contains all data points for graphs in the manuscript as well as supplementary data and charts. Click on the icon, "1973-1998 Report to the Nation") American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org
CDC's Division of Cancer Prevention and Control: http://www.cdc.gov/cancer
CDC's National Center for Health Statistics mortality report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/dvs/mortdata.htm
NAACCR: http://www.naaccr.org/
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Breast cancer rates jump in China Expert blames unhealthy lifestyles, increasing taste for junk food
updated 6:47 p.m. ET Oct. 31, 2007 BEIJING - An increasing taste for Western-style junk food and unhealthy lifestyles have caused the rate of breast cancer among urban Chinese women to jump sharply over the past decade, a state-run newspaper said Tuesday.
In China's commercial center of Shanghai, 55 out of every 100,000 women have breast cancer, a 31 percent increase since 1997, the China Daily reported.
About 45 out of every 100,000 women in Beijing have the disease, a 23 percent increase over 10 years.
"Unhealthy lifestyles are mostly to blame for the growing numbers," professor Qiao Youlin of the Cancer Institute and Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences told the newspaper. Poor diets, environmental pollution and increased stress are among the provoking factors, he said.
The report is the latest illustration of how Chinese are increasingly being diagnosed with diseases more common in the developed world, even while the national health care system remains fragile, expensive and out of reach to many Chinese.
Rising affluence has led to more fat and junk food in Chinese diets, which traditionally consisted mainly of vegetables, tofu and grains such as rice. An estimated 60 million Chinese — equal to the population of France — already are obese and rates of high blood pressure and diabetes are climbing.
Earlier research has linked alcohol, tobacco and unhealthy diets — full of fat and salt — to various types of cancer.
China's breakneck economic growth has not only affected the health of city dwellers; state media said Monday that birth defects in newborns have soared in coal mining regions as an apparent result of heavy pollution.
The report did not give figures, but data posted earlier this month on the Web site of the government's National Population and Family Planning Commission said the national rate of birth defects had increased by nearly 50 percent between 2001 and 2006, rising to 145.5 per 10,000 births.
Results from eight main coal mining areas in Shanxi province show levels far higher than the national average, according to a Xinhua News Agency report. Shanxi is one of China's most heavily polluted regions, mainly as a result of heavy mining and use of high-sulfur coal, demand for which is soaring with the rising economy.
Breast cancer is the leading form of the disease attacking women in Asia, followed by cervical cancer. Both can greatly be reduced by screening — such as mammograms and pap smears or the new HPV vaccine that protects against a virus that can cause cervical cancer. However, cost, cultural barriers and lack of awareness have hampered early detection.
Since we are talking about cultural construction, the Chinese government can somehow argue that most negative influences of chemicals are constructed. So under-average height/weight or chronic weakness get a totally new meaning by adding numbers of buddy burden...
[Thanks Martin for finding some data above. I was looking for the actual cancer rates percentages of incidence in the full U.S. population. That is (studiously?) left out of the report. Why? What's the overall rate of cancer? Instead of just whether it is recently rising or falling? What does that compare with early 20th century? With mid-century? With the 1990s?
That general background rate rising is the thing over generations.
I'll bring a few books to class next time that address the general rates. My 'favorite' quote in what Martin posted:
"Otis W. Brawley, M.D., chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society (ACS): "However, we have to be somewhat cautious about how we interpret it, because changes in incidence can be caused not only by reductions in risk factors for cancer, but also by changes in screening practices. Regardless, the continuing drop in mortality is evidence once again of real progress made against cancer, reflecting real gains in prevention, early detection, and treatment." [instead of necessarily reduced body burdens.]
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1. Mark Whitaker
2. Interesting "Green Treadmill" Motif Seen in recent Korean Policies, Turnaround or the same form of primed monopoly capitalism?
3. Schnaiberg assumed that the three groups of his treadmill motif 'had to' be allied only in the interests of expansion of the energy intensiveness of 'additions and withdrawals' to and from the environment. What happens when the same treadmill politics promote green? Food for thought: 'treadmill alliances' are only argued by Schnaiberg's deductive model when the real world interactions might increasingly encourage equal treadmill alliances for greening consumption expansion...
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04-29-2009 19:05 Hybrid Car Buyers to Enjoy W3.3 Million Tax Cut
By Yoon Ja-young Staff Reporter
Those who buy hybrid cars will get up to 3.3 million won in tax cuts.
According to the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, the government plans to offer tax cuts to buyers of hybrid cars in order to promote the green growth industry and boost demand for the automobiles as part of current economic stimulus measures.
The government already announced a plan to slash up to 2.5 million won in tax on those who exchange old cars until the end of this year to help boost the economy, but the tax cut on hybrid cars aims at achieving the goals of economic stimulus and energy saving.
Hybrid cars utilize two different types of energy; they switch between a gasoline engine and an electric motor run by kinetic energy, which leads to fuel efficiency double that of ordinary cars.
Currently, the Honda Civic Hybrid is selling here, and domestic hybrid cars are scheduled to come on the market soon. Hyundai will launch the Avante LPI Hybrid in July, and Kia's Forte Hybrid is scheduled to debut in September.
However, they're expensive, usually priced at least around three to four million won more than gasoline cars.
Automakers expect the tax cut, coupled with better mileage, to make up for the hybrid cars' higher prices. When a driver drives 20,000 kilometers on a Forte LPI Hybrid for a year, for example, the fuel costs could be one million won, around half of what it costs to drive a gasoline model.
The government plans to cut various auto-related taxes, including consumption, registration and acquisition taxes, starting from July 1 until the end of 2012. The tax cut could be as much as 3.3 million won per car.
The tax cut will be applied to not only those who buy new hybrid cars, either domestic or imported, but also those who buy second-hand hybrid cars.
3. When major violaters of environment are mega corporations, it is very hard to obtain information about their awareness in the harms that they caused. The easiest way out for the TNCs is to play innocent when arduous environmentalists come upon tangible information about such involvement. It was lost within the bureaucratic structure, certain middle-range offical accidentally or intentionally omitted such information... The excuse can go on and on. But when giant international organizations like the UN is struggling with its inefficient bureaucratic politics to speed up its research on the extent of human influence on global warming, the industries almost always do their homework, conceal the results without positive alteration to their production, and put on an innocent face when the time comes. How to make the environment risk seem big enough a threat to the actual benefit of the industries will be the biggest challenge for the environmental movements. Enviroment should come across as a major deficient to cost (second contradiction of capital), instead of simple lack of morals. ---------------------------------- For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.
Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.
Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.
George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.
“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”
William O’Keefe, at the time a leader of the Global Climate Coalition, said in a telephone interview that the group’s leadership had not been aware of a gap between the public campaign and the advisers’ views. Mr. O’Keefe said the coalition’s leaders had felt that the scientific uncertainty justified a cautious approach to addressing cuts in greenhouse gases.
The coalition disbanded in 2002, but some members, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute, continue to lobby against any law or treaty that would sharply curb emissions. Others, like Exxon Mobil, now recognize a human contribution to global warming and have largely dropped financial support to groups challenging the science.
Documents drawn up by the coalition’s advisers were provided to lawyers by the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, a coalition member, during the discovery process in a lawsuit that the auto industry filed in 2007 against the State of California’s efforts to limit vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions. The documents included drafts of a primer written for the coalition by its technical advisory committee, as well as minutes of the advisers’ meetings.
The documents were recently sent to The New York Times by a lawyer for environmental groups that sided with the state. The lawyer, eager to maintain a cordial relationship with the court, insisted on anonymity because the litigation is continuing.
The advisory committee was led by Leonard S. Bernstein, a chemical engineer and climate expert then at the Mobil Corporation. At the time the committee’s primer was drawn up, policy makers in the United States and abroad were arguing over the scope of the international climate-change agreement that in 1997 became the Kyoto Protocol. The primer rejected the idea that mounting evidence already suggested that human activities were warming the climate, as a 1995 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had concluded. (In a report in 2007, the panel concluded with near certainty that most recent warming had been caused by humans.)
Yet the primer also found unpersuasive the arguments being used by skeptics, including the possibility that temperatures were only appearing to rise because of flawed climate records.
“The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change,” the advisory committee said in the 17-page primer.
According to the minutes of an advisory committee meeting that are among the disclosed documents, the primer was approved by the coalition’s operating committee early in 1996. But the approval came only after the operating committee had asked the advisers to omit the section that rebutted the contrarian arguments.
“This idea was accepted,” the minutes said, “and that portion of the paper will be dropped.”
The primer itself was never publicly distributed.
Mr. O’Keefe, who was then chairman of the Global Climate Coalition and a senior official of the American Petroleum Institute, the lobby for oil companies, said in the phone interview that he recalled seeing parts of the primer.
But he said he was not aware of the dropped sections when a copy of the approved final draft was sent to him. He said a change of that kind would have been made by the staff before the document was brought to the board for final consideration.
“I have no idea why the section on the contrarians would have been deleted,” said Mr. O’Keefe, now chief executive of the Marshall Institute, a nonprofit research group that opposes a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions.
“One thing I’m absolutely certain of,” he said, “is that no member of the board of the Global Climate Coalition said, ‘We have to suppress this.’ ”
Benjamin D. Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory whose work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was challenged by the Global Climate Coalition and allied groups, said the coalition was “engaging in a full-court press at the time, trying to cast doubt on the bottom-line conclusion of the I.P.C.C.” That panel concluded in 1995 that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”
“I’m amazed and astonished,” Dr. Santer said, “that the Global Climate Coalition had in their possession scientific information that substantiated our cautious findings and then chose to suppress that information.”
Editors' Note: May 2, 2009 A front-page article and headline on April 24 reported that the Global Climate Coalition, a group that throughout the 1990s represented industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, knew about the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions could cause global warming but ignored it in a lobbying and public relations campaign against efforts to curb emissions.
The coalition, the article said, maintained publicly that scientists disagreed about whether greenhouse gases generated by humans could cause warming even after its own scientific advisory committee concluded that the evidence for the “potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”
The article cited a “backgrounder” that laid out the coalition’s public stance, published in the early 1990s and distributed widely to lawmakers and journalists. However, the article failed to note a later version of the backgrounder that included language that conformed to the scientific advisory committee’s conclusion. The later version was distributed publicly in 1998, but existed in some form as early as 1995, according to an online archive kept by Greenpeace. The amended version, which was brought to the attention of The Times by a reader, acknowledged the consensus that greenhouse gases could contribute to warming. What scientists disagreed about, it said, was “the rate and magnitude of the ‘enhanced greenhouse effect’ (warming) that will result.”
The coalition did, however, as the article reported, remove from an internal report by the scientific advisory committee a section that said that “contrarian” theories of why global temperatures appeared to be rising “do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.” After the later, amended version of the backgrounder was published, the coalition continued to question the scientific evidence that greenhouse gas emissions could heat the planet enough to justify sharp cuts in emissions. In the 1995 report, the advisory committee had concluded that “substantially higher atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases” constituted a “potential threat.”
Milwaukee, Wisconsin suffered an extreme invasion of cryptosporidium in 2000 when an unusal wind situation reversed the natural currents of Lake Erie and pushed water from the usual downstream flows into the city water system. It turns out that a company called Sara Lea has an abbatoir downstream and someone had inadvertantly??? diverted waste from the killing floor into storm drains. Hundreds of thousands were sickened and Sara Lea settled out of court where the information about the real cause of the outbreak was suppressed. Later, the city I live in, used a study of that outbreak which suggested the crypto came from the inability for chlorine to treat the highly turbid water from the lake. My city fathers accepted this report as proof that spring runoff is the cause of the problem we were having. The actual cause of the problem was 42 sources for fecal waste from upstream sources including the buildup of feedlots with thousands of animals within meters of the river. The point is much of what should be included in the dialogue of environmental issues and answers, is suppressed by the court system.
3. This article discusses how Chevron reacted when "60 Minutes" planned to have a show uncovering pollution from oil companies in the Amazon Rain Forest. Chevron hired an ex-reporter to tell their side of the story in an attempt to salvage their image. It was a form of media defense. This shows the lengths of corruption that oil companies will go to in order to maintain continuous profit.
--------------- When Chevron Hires Ex-Reporter to Investigate Pollution, Chevron Looks Good E-MAIL SEND TO PHONE PRINT REPRINTS SHARE
By BRIAN STELTER Published: May 10, 2009 What did Chevron do when it learned that “60 Minutes” was preparing a potentially damaging report about oil company contamination of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador? It hired a former journalist to produce a mirror image of the report, from the corporation’s point of view.
Related Report Says Chevron Owes Billions for Ecuadorean Pollution (April 3, 2008)
Add to Portfolio Chevron Corp Go to your Portfolio » As a demonstration of just how far companies will go to counteract negative publicity, the Chevron case is extraordinary. Gene Randall, a former CNN correspondent, spent about five months on the project, which was posted on the Internet in April, three weeks before the “60 Minutes” report was shown on May 3.
“Chevron hired me to tell its side of the story,” he said. “That’s what I did.”
The two videos — one by CBS, the other by a corporation being scrutinized by CBS — run about 14 minutes long. They each discuss a class-action lawsuit filed by Ecuadoreans who accuse Texaco, a company acquired by Chevron in 2001, of poisoning the rain forest.
An Ecuadorean judge is expected to rule soon on whether Chevron owes up to $27 billion in damages, which would make the case “the largest environmental lawsuit in history,” the “60 Minutes” correspondent, Scott Pelley, said.
Both videos start with a correspondent appearing on camera and calling it a “bitter” dispute. But from there, they diverge. The “60 Minutes” report visits the rain forest, talks to the Ecuadorean judge and interviews a Chevron manager. The Chevron video interviews the same Chevron manager, as well as five professors who are consultants to the oil company, but none of the plaintiffs.
The Chevron video never directly claims to be journalism. But a casual viewer could be swayed by the description — “Gene Randall reporting” — and the journalistic devices used, including file footage of the rain forest and over-the-shoulder interviews with experts. Chevron posted the video on YouTube as well as its own Web site devoted to the lawsuit.
Chevron declined to answer questions about the video. But in a statement, it said that “we produced this video in response to a campaign waged by trial lawyers. They’ve turned to Hollywood to tell a fictional story. We’ve turned to an award-winning, former journalist to tell a factual story.”
Mr. Randall, who has been a corporate consultant since leaving CNN in 2001, had worked with Chevron once before, as an interviewer of the company’s chief executive for a corporate Web video. When the company approached Mr. Randall late last year, he said he had researched the Ecuador lawsuit and “became convinced that their side had not gotten out there.”
The first Google search result for the words “Chevron in Ecuador” shows a Web site created by Amazon Watch, an environmental activist group, that blames “Chevron’s negligence” for injuries and deaths in the country. Chevron has since bought Google ads so that its Web site about the lawsuit, which includes Mr. Randall’s video, appears as a sponsored link.
Mitch Anderson, a campaigner for Amazon Watch, said that Chevron had resorted to “embarrassing public relations tactics” because credible news sources had not sufficiently framed the report the way they would like, namely, to “to place all of the blame for Texaco’s environmental disaster in Ecuador on PetroEcuador,” Texaco’s former partner.
Mr. Randall’s video acknowledges the claims of the plaintiffs many times, primarily to set up Chevron’s response. “This is not a news report,” he said in an interview. “This is a client hiring a provider to tell its side of the story.” The video ends with a voiceover saying “Gene Randall reporting.”
Jeff Fager, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” said his staff would have liked the same access that Mr. Randall had to Chevron. The oil company’s chief environmental scientist appears in the corporate video, but “they wouldn’t let us interview her,” Mr. Fager said.
Mr. Fager emphasized that the “60 Minutes” segment was “well-reported and fair.”
“I’m sure that Chevron preferred the story they told to the one we told, but that’s not journalism, that’s advocacy,” he said.
Their advocacy may not have had a serious effect. While the “60 Minutes” report reached at least 12 million viewers on television, the Chevron-sponsored effort has received only about 2,000 views on YouTube. Chevron would not say how many views it had counted on its own Web site.
“Most companies like their own advertising best, and this is not a whole lot different,” Mr. Fager said.
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
1. Martin Weiser
ReplyDelete2. Cancer Rates and Chinese Assumptions
3. The lecture on "Silent Spring" made me interested in looking on some recent statistics about cancer rates which I found at the website of the US National Cancer Institute. Interestingly the statistics are speaking for a steady decline in cancer rates since 1992. Of course there are some differences within the general decline like the rates of lung cancer. However, altogether the rise in cancer which constructed resulted out of the large-scale release of new chemicals seems to be reversed.
This conclusion seems rational to me since all chemicals released are getting distributed more evenly by time and partly stay in areas where they are virtually excluded from the human food chain etc. Just think about the DDT in rats or whatever.
I also found an article about the Chinese government and its dealing with rising breast cancer rates. Interestingly they blame changing life-style and unhealthy diet for the rise. Although I do not know the original article - which might at least draw a more significant indirect connection between pollution and cancer - I think the Chinese government tries to downplay the role of industrial pollution.
----------US Cancer Rates-------------
Annual Report to the Nation Finds Declines in Cancer Incidence and Death Rates; Special Feature Reveals Wide Variations in Lung Cancer Trends across States
A new report from the nation's leading cancer organizations shows that, for the first time since the report was first issued in 1998, both incidence and death rates for all cancers combined are decreasing for both men and women, driven largely by declines in some of the most common types of cancer. The report notes that, although the decreases in overall cancer incidence and death rates are encouraging, large state and regional differences in lung cancer trends among women underscore the need to strengthen many state tobacco control programs. The findings come from the "Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975-2005, Featuring Trends in Lung Cancer, Tobacco Use and Tobacco Control", online Nov. 25, 2008, and appearing in the Dec. 2, 2008, Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Although cancer death rates have been dropping since the publication of the first Annual Report to the Nation 10 years ago, the latest edition marks the first time the report has documented a simultaneous decline in cancer incidence, the rate at which new cancers are diagnosed, for both men and women. Based on the long-term incidence trend, rates for all cancers combined decreased 0.8 percent per year from 1999 through 2005 for both sexes combined; rates decreased 1.8 percent per year from 2001 through 2005 for men and 0.6 percent per year from 1998 through 2005 for women. The decline in both incidence and death rates for all cancers combined is due in large part to declines in the three most common cancers among men (lung, colon/rectum, and prostate) and the two most common cancers among women (breast and colon/rectum), combined with a leveling off of lung cancer death rates among women.
"The drop in incidence seen in this year's Annual Report is something we've been waiting to see for a long time," said Otis W. Brawley, M.D., chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society (ACS). "However, we have to be somewhat cautious about how we interpret it, because changes in incidence can be caused not only by reductions in risk factors for cancer, but also by changes in screening practices. Regardless, the continuing drop in mortality is evidence once again of real progress made against cancer, reflecting real gains in prevention, early detection, and treatment."
The new report shows that, from 1996 through 2005, death rates for all cancers combined decreased for all racial and ethnic populations and for both men and women, except for American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, for whom rates were stable. The drop in death rates has been steeper for men, who have higher rates, than for women. Death rates declined for 10 of the top 15 causes of cancer death among both men and women. However, death rates for certain individual cancers are increasing, including esophageal cancer for men, pancreatic cancer for women, and liver cancer for both men and women. Overall cancer death rates were highest for African-Americans and lowest for Asian American/Pacific Islanders.
Among men, incidence rates dropped for cancers of the lung, colon/rectum, oral cavity, and stomach. Prostate cancer incidence rates decreased by 4.4 percent per year from 2001 through 2005 after increasing by 2.1 percent per year from 1995 to 2001. In contrast, incidence rates increased for cancers of the liver, kidney, and esophagus, as well as for melanoma (2003-2005), non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and myeloma. Incidence rates were stable for cancers of the bladder, pancreas, and brain/nervous system, and for leukemia.
For women, incidence rates dropped for cancers of the breast, colon/rectum, uterus, ovary, cervix, and oral cavity but increased for cancers of the lung, thyroid, pancreas, brain/nervous system, bladder, and kidney, as well as for leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and melanoma.
"While we have made progress in reducing the burden of cancer in this country, we must accelerate our efforts, including making a special effort to reach underserved cancer patients in the communities where they live," said National Cancer Institute (NCI) Director John Niederhuber, M.D. "This report gives us a better understanding of where we may need to redouble our efforts and try to find new ways of preventing or reducing the occurrence of kidney, liver, and other cancers that continue to show increases in both mortality and/or incidence."
The Special Feature section of the Report highlights wide variations in tobacco smoking patterns across the United States, which, coupled with differences in smoking behaviors in younger versus older populations, helps explains the delay in an expected decrease in lung cancer deaths among women and a slowing of the decrease in lung cancer deaths among men.
The report finds substantial differences in lung cancer death rate trends by state and geographic region. For example, lung cancer death rates dropped an average of 2.8 percent per year among men in California from 1996 through 2005, more than twice the drop seen in many states in the Midwest and the South. The geographic variation is even more extreme among women, for whom lung cancer death rates increased from 1996 through 2005 in 13 states and decreased only in three. The report also notes that, in five states (Pennsylvania, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Idaho), lung cancer incidence among women showed an increasing trend, whereas the mortality trend was level.
"It's very promising to see the progress we are making in our fight against cancer," said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Julie Gerberding, M.D. "Unfortunately, tobacco use continues to plague our country, and it's the primary reason why lung cancer continues to rob too many people of a long, productive, and healthy life. We must recommit ourselves to implementing tobacco control programs that we know work if we are truly going to impact the staggering toll of tobacco on our society."
Variation in smoking prevalence among the states is influenced by several factors, including public awareness of the harms of tobacco use, social acceptance of tobacco use, local tobacco control activities, and tobacco industry promotional activities targeted in a geographic area. The 13 states where lung cancer death rates for women are on the rise have higher percentages of adult female smokers, low excise taxes, and local economies that are traditionally dependent on tobacco farming and production. In contrast, California, which was the first state to implement a comprehensive, statewide tobacco control program, was the only state in the country to show declines in both lung cancer incidence and deaths in women.
According to a U.S. Surgeon General's report, cigarette smoking accounts for approximately 30 percent of all cancer deaths, with lung cancer accounting for 80 percent of the smoking-attributable cancer deaths. Other cancers caused by smoking include cancers of the oral cavity, pharynx, larynx, esophagus, stomach, bladder, pancreas, liver, kidney, and uterine cervix and myeloid leukemia.
"We can see that, in areas of the country where smoking and tobacco use are entrenched in daily life, men and women continue to pay a price with higher incidence and death rates from many types of cancer. This type of geographic variation in smoking-related cancers is due to smoking behaviors, not regional environmental factors," said Betsy A. Kohler, M.P.H., executive director of the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR).
"The observed decrease in the incidence and death rates from all cancers combined in men and women overall and in nearly all racial and ethnic groups is highly encouraging," conclude the authors. "However, this must be seen as a starting point rather than a destination." They say a dual effort, combining better application of existing knowledge with ongoing research to improve prevention, early detection, and treatment will be needed to sustain and extend this progress into the future.
The study was conducted by scientists at the ACS, CDC, NCI, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, and the NAACCR.
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Annual Report Shows Overall Decline in U.S. Cancer Incidence and Death Rates; Feature Focuses on Cancers with Recent Increasing Trends
The rates for new cancer cases and deaths for all cancers combined continued to decline in the United States, according to a report released today which includes new data for the period between 1992 to 1998. The report is by the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries (NAACCR); the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS); the American Cancer Society (ACS); and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). A feature section of the report focuses on a dozen cancers whose overall rates are increasing.
"This welcome news on declining rates underscores the incredible progress we've made against cancer, but it also reminds us that our fight is far from over," said Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. "It is clear that we must not only treat cancer, but beat this deadly disease. That is why we are aggressively promoting cancer-related research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)."HHS has proposed an increase of $514 million for cancer-related research at NIH in 2002, a 12 percent increase over current year spending.
The "Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1973-1998, Featuring Cancers with Recent Increasing Trends" is published in the June 6, 2001 (Vol. 93, Issue 11, pages 824-842), issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.*
"These findings highlight the progress we've made against cancer but also underscore the critical need for research and for equitably applying what we already know to sustain this progress," said NCI Director Richard D. Klausner, M.D.
The report shows that the incidence rate for all cancers combined -- the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 persons per year -- declined on average 1.1 percent per year between 1992 and 1998. This overall trend reversed a pattern of increasing incidence rates from 1973 to 1992. Most of the decline can be attributed to a 2.9 percent yearly decline in white males and a 3.1 percent yearly decline in black males. "I am most excited to see that rates of new cases of cancer declined in the 1990s for both black and white men. It will take time to tell, but this could be a sign that the disparities among racial and ethnic groups are lessening," said James S. Marks, M.D., director of CDC's National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion.
"More good news is the continuing fall in cancer death rates by 1.6 percent per year for men and 0.8 percent per year for women between 1992 to 1998," said John R. Seffrin, Ph.D., chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society. "Particularly welcome is that the largest decrease -- 2.5 percent per year -- occurred in black men, who bear the heaviest cancer burden." Overall cancer mortality declined 1.1 percent yearly for the period from 1992 to 1998.
Four cancer sites -- lung, prostate, breast, and colorectum -- accounted for about
56 percent of all new cancer cases and were also the leading causes of cancer deaths for every racial and ethnic group, which includes white, black, Asian/Pacific Islander, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Hispanic populations. Because these sites comprise over half of all cancer cases, they have a strong influence on overall cancer trends.
Breast cancer makes up 16.3 percent of all cancer cases and accounts for 7.8 percent of all deaths due to cancer. Breast cancer death rates have continued to decline due to improvements in early detection and treatment. However, breast cancer incidence rates have increased by more than 40 percent from 1973 to 1998.
One explanation for the increase in breast cancer incidence rates comes from analyses which indicate that more early stage disease is being diagnosed, suggesting that use of aggressive screening and early detection, primarily mammography, may account for part of this increase. "The extent to which other factors, such as more obesity and post-menopausal hormone use, may contribute to the increase is unknown," said Brenda K. Edwards, Ph.D., of NCI, final author of the report. A rise in the rate of stage II node-positive disease diagnosed in white women 50 to 64 years of age is a more recent observation, Edwards added.
Prostate cancer, which accounts for 14.8 percent of all cases, saw a sharp increase in incidence rates starting in the late 1980s with the introduction of screening for Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA). Subsequently, however, rates have started to decline. Death rates have also declined in recent years. Much of the wide variation in prostate cancer incidence rates across the country can be attributed to differing rates of PSA screening, with geographic areas of high usage of PSA reporting high incidence rates, often the result of the discovery of clinically insignificant tumors.
Lung cancer accounts for 29 percent of cancer deaths in the United States and
13.2 percent of the cases. Overall, lung cancer incidence rates decreased 1.6 percent per year between 1992 and 1998, due mainly to a decline of 2.7 percent per year in men and a leveling off of rates in women, both manifestations of reductions in tobacco smoking since the 1960s. Lung cancer mortality began to decrease in 1990 in men but an increase in mortality continued until at least 1998 in women. Long-term trends show that women have lagged behind men in lung cancer incidence and death rates. "Significantly, lung cancer death rates in women increased 0.8 percent per year but this rate of increase is slower than earlier periods," said Edward J. Sondik, Ph.D., director of CDC's NCHS.
Colorectal cancer accounts for 11.6 percent of all cancer cases but incidence and death rates vary widely by race and ethnicity. Incidence rates for colorectal cancer ranged from 10.2 per 100,000 in the Hispanic population to 22.8 per 100,000 in the black population. Historically, incidence rates from colorectal cancer increased until 1985, then decreased 1.8 percent per year through 1995, and have stabilized through the latest reporting period in 1998. A long-term decrease in death rates in most populations began between 1992 and 1998 but remained stable in black females during this period. Detection of earlier stages of disease and more effective treatments have led to the decline in death rates seen in most populations.
"Ten other cancers, in addition to the recent rise in female breast cancer incidence rates and the long-term increase in female lung cancer death rates, have increased in either incidence or death rates from 1992 to 1998. These 10 cancer sites together account for about 13 percent of all cancer cases and deaths," said Holly L. Howe, Ph.D., executive director of NAACCR, and senior author of this report.
These diverse and relatively uncommon cancers include (in descending order of their contribution to total cancer deaths):
• Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma (4.4 percent of deaths, 4.0 percent of cases in 1998)
• Liver and intrahepatic bile duct (2.3 percent of deaths, 1.2 percent of cases in 1998)
• Esophagus (2.2 percent of deaths, 0.9 percent of cases in 1998)
• Melanoma (1.4 percent of deaths, 3.5 percent of cases in 1998)
• Acute Myeloid Leukemia (1.3 percent of deaths, 0.8 percent of cases in 1998)
• Soft (connective) Tissue including Heart (0.7 percent of deaths, 0.6 percent of cases in 1998)
• Thyroid (0.4 percent of deaths, 1.5 percent of cases in 1998)
• Small intestine (0.2 percent of deaths, 0.3 percent of cases in 1998)
• Vulva (0.1 percent of deaths, 0.3 percent of cases in 1998)
• Peritoneum, Omentum, and Mesentery (0.1 percent of deaths, 0.1 percent of cases in 1998)
The report is based on incidence data from NCI's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) program, the CDC's National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR), and NAACCR. Mortality data come from the CDC's NCHS.
Authors of this report identified several strategies for reducing future incidence and death from cancer, the most critical being the reduction of tobacco use in all segments of the population, since smoking causes an estimated 30 percent of all cancer deaths. Another strategy would be to improve the use of currently effective but underutilized cancer screening tools. Other strategies identified include developing and applying state-of-the-art diagnostic tests and treatments, as well as identifying and reducing health disparities across diverse populations.
*The authors of this year's report are Holly L. Howe, Ph.D. (NAACCR), Phyllis A. Wingo, Ph.D. (CDC), Michael J. Thun, M.D. (ACS), Lynn A.G. Ries, M.S. (NCI), Harry M. Rosenberg, Ph.D. (CDC), Ellen G. Feigal, M.D. (NCI), and Brenda K. Edwards, Ph.D. (NCI).
# # #
For additional background on this report, a set of Questions and Answers can be found at: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/1998-annual-report-increasing-trends
For more information, visit the following Web sites:
SEER Homepage: http://www.seer.cancer.gov
(This site contains all data points for graphs in the manuscript as well as supplementary data and charts. Click on the icon, "1973-1998 Report to the Nation")
American Cancer Society: http://www.cancer.org
CDC's Division of Cancer Prevention and Control: http://www.cdc.gov/cancer
CDC's National Center for Health Statistics mortality report: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/dvs/mortdata.htm
NAACCR: http://www.naaccr.org/
---------
Breast cancer rates jump in China
Expert blames unhealthy lifestyles, increasing taste for junk food
updated 6:47 p.m. ET Oct. 31, 2007
BEIJING - An increasing taste for Western-style junk food and unhealthy lifestyles have caused the rate of breast cancer among urban Chinese women to jump sharply over the past decade, a state-run newspaper said Tuesday.
In China's commercial center of Shanghai, 55 out of every 100,000 women have breast cancer, a 31 percent increase since 1997, the China Daily reported.
About 45 out of every 100,000 women in Beijing have the disease, a 23 percent increase over 10 years.
"Unhealthy lifestyles are mostly to blame for the growing numbers," professor Qiao Youlin of the Cancer Institute and Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences told the newspaper. Poor diets, environmental pollution and increased stress are among the provoking factors, he said.
The report is the latest illustration of how Chinese are increasingly being diagnosed with diseases more common in the developed world, even while the national health care system remains fragile, expensive and out of reach to many Chinese.
Rising affluence has led to more fat and junk food in Chinese diets, which traditionally consisted mainly of vegetables, tofu and grains such as rice. An estimated 60 million Chinese — equal to the population of France — already are obese and rates of high blood pressure and diabetes are climbing.
Earlier research has linked alcohol, tobacco and unhealthy diets — full of fat and salt — to various types of cancer.
China's breakneck economic growth has not only affected the health of city dwellers; state media said Monday that birth defects in newborns have soared in coal mining regions as an apparent result of heavy pollution.
The report did not give figures, but data posted earlier this month on the Web site of the government's National Population and Family Planning Commission said the national rate of birth defects had increased by nearly 50 percent between 2001 and 2006, rising to 145.5 per 10,000 births.
Results from eight main coal mining areas in Shanxi province show levels far higher than the national average, according to a Xinhua News Agency report. Shanxi is one of China's most heavily polluted regions, mainly as a result of heavy mining and use of high-sulfur coal, demand for which is soaring with the rising economy.
Breast cancer is the leading form of the disease attacking women in Asia, followed by cervical cancer. Both can greatly be reduced by screening — such as mammograms and pap smears or the new HPV vaccine that protects against a virus that can cause cervical cancer. However, cost, cultural barriers and lack of awareness have hampered early detection.
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http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter/pressreleases/ReportNation2008Release
http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter/reportnation
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21568058/
Just forgot something....
ReplyDeleteSince we are talking about cultural construction, the Chinese government can somehow argue that most negative influences of chemicals are constructed. So under-average height/weight or chronic weakness get a totally new meaning by adding numbers of buddy burden...
[Thanks Martin for finding some data above. I was looking for the actual cancer rates percentages of incidence in the full U.S. population. That is (studiously?) left out of the report. Why? What's the overall rate of cancer? Instead of just whether it is recently rising or falling? What does that compare with early 20th century? With mid-century? With the 1990s?
ReplyDeleteThat general background rate rising is the thing over generations.
I'll bring a few books to class next time that address the general rates. My 'favorite' quote in what Martin posted:
"Otis W. Brawley, M.D., chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society (ACS): "However, we have to be somewhat cautious about how we interpret it, because changes in incidence can be caused not only by reductions in risk factors for cancer, but also by changes in screening practices. Regardless, the continuing drop in mortality is evidence once again of real progress made against cancer, reflecting real gains in prevention, early detection, and treatment." [instead of necessarily reduced body burdens.]
------------------
1. Mark Whitaker
2. Interesting "Green Treadmill" Motif Seen in recent Korean Policies, Turnaround or the same form of primed monopoly capitalism?
3. Schnaiberg assumed that the three groups of his treadmill motif 'had to' be allied only in the interests of expansion of the energy intensiveness of 'additions and withdrawals' to and from the environment. What happens when the same treadmill politics promote green? Food for thought: 'treadmill alliances' are only argued by Schnaiberg's deductive model when the real world interactions might increasingly encourage equal treadmill alliances for greening consumption expansion...
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04-29-2009 19:05
Hybrid Car Buyers to Enjoy W3.3 Million Tax Cut
By Yoon Ja-young
Staff Reporter
Those who buy hybrid cars will get up to 3.3 million won in tax cuts.
According to the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, the government plans to offer tax cuts to buyers of hybrid cars in order to promote the green growth industry and boost demand for the automobiles as part of current economic stimulus measures.
The government already announced a plan to slash up to 2.5 million won in tax on those who exchange old cars until the end of this year to help boost the economy, but the tax cut on hybrid cars aims at achieving the goals of economic stimulus and energy saving.
Hybrid cars utilize two different types of energy; they switch between a gasoline engine and an electric motor run by kinetic energy, which leads to fuel efficiency double that of ordinary cars.
Currently, the Honda Civic Hybrid is selling here, and domestic hybrid cars are scheduled to come on the market soon. Hyundai will launch the Avante LPI Hybrid in July, and Kia's Forte Hybrid is scheduled to debut in September.
However, they're expensive, usually priced at least around three to four million won more than gasoline cars.
Automakers expect the tax cut, coupled with better mileage, to make up for the hybrid cars' higher prices. When a driver drives 20,000 kilometers on a Forte LPI Hybrid for a year, for example, the fuel costs could be one million won, around half of what it costs to drive a gasoline model.
The government plans to cut various auto-related taxes, including consumption, registration and acquisition taxes, starting from July 1 until the end of 2012. The tax cut could be as much as 3.3 million won per car.
The tax cut will be applied to not only those who buy new hybrid cars, either domestic or imported, but also those who buy second-hand hybrid cars.
chizpizza@koreatimes.co.kr
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http://koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/05/123_44079.html
1. Young Hui Na
ReplyDelete2. When conspiracy is proven to be true
3. When major violaters of environment are mega corporations, it is very hard to obtain information about their awareness in the harms that they caused. The easiest way out for the TNCs is to play innocent when arduous environmentalists come upon tangible information about such involvement. It was lost within the bureaucratic structure, certain middle-range offical accidentally or intentionally omitted such information... The excuse can go on and on. But when giant international organizations like the UN is struggling with its inefficient bureaucratic politics to speed up its research on the extent of human influence on global warming, the industries almost always do their homework, conceal the results without positive alteration to their production, and put on an innocent face when the time comes.
How to make the environment risk seem big enough a threat to the actual benefit of the industries will be the biggest challenge for the environmental movements. Enviroment should come across as a major deficient to cost (second contradiction of capital), instead of simple lack of morals.
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For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.
Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.
Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.
George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.
“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”
William O’Keefe, at the time a leader of the Global Climate Coalition, said in a telephone interview that the group’s leadership had not been aware of a gap between the public campaign and the advisers’ views. Mr. O’Keefe said the coalition’s leaders had felt that the scientific uncertainty justified a cautious approach to addressing cuts in greenhouse gases.
The coalition disbanded in 2002, but some members, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute, continue to lobby against any law or treaty that would sharply curb emissions. Others, like Exxon Mobil, now recognize a human contribution to global warming and have largely dropped financial support to groups challenging the science.
Documents drawn up by the coalition’s advisers were provided to lawyers by the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, a coalition member, during the discovery process in a lawsuit that the auto industry filed in 2007 against the State of California’s efforts to limit vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions. The documents included drafts of a primer written for the coalition by its technical advisory committee, as well as minutes of the advisers’ meetings.
The documents were recently sent to The New York Times by a lawyer for environmental groups that sided with the state. The lawyer, eager to maintain a cordial relationship with the court, insisted on anonymity because the litigation is continuing.
The advisory committee was led by Leonard S. Bernstein, a chemical engineer and climate expert then at the Mobil Corporation. At the time the committee’s primer was drawn up, policy makers in the United States and abroad were arguing over the scope of the international climate-change agreement that in 1997 became the Kyoto Protocol.
The primer rejected the idea that mounting evidence already suggested that human activities were warming the climate, as a 1995 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had concluded. (In a report in 2007, the panel concluded with near certainty that most recent warming had been caused by humans.)
Yet the primer also found unpersuasive the arguments being used by skeptics, including the possibility that temperatures were only appearing to rise because of flawed climate records.
“The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change,” the advisory committee said in the 17-page primer.
According to the minutes of an advisory committee meeting that are among the disclosed documents, the primer was approved by the coalition’s operating committee early in 1996. But the approval came only after the operating committee had asked the advisers to omit the section that rebutted the contrarian arguments.
“This idea was accepted,” the minutes said, “and that portion of the paper will be dropped.”
The primer itself was never publicly distributed.
Mr. O’Keefe, who was then chairman of the Global Climate Coalition and a senior official of the American Petroleum Institute, the lobby for oil companies, said in the phone interview that he recalled seeing parts of the primer.
But he said he was not aware of the dropped sections when a copy of the approved final draft was sent to him. He said a change of that kind would have been made by the staff before the document was brought to the board for final consideration.
“I have no idea why the section on the contrarians would have been deleted,” said Mr. O’Keefe, now chief executive of the Marshall Institute, a nonprofit research group that opposes a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions.
“One thing I’m absolutely certain of,” he said, “is that no member of the board of the Global Climate Coalition said, ‘We have to suppress this.’ ”
Benjamin D. Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory whose work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was challenged by the Global Climate Coalition and allied groups, said the coalition was “engaging in a full-court press at the time, trying to cast doubt on the bottom-line conclusion of the I.P.C.C.” That panel concluded in 1995 that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”
“I’m amazed and astonished,” Dr. Santer said, “that the Global Climate Coalition had in their possession scientific information that substantiated our cautious findings and then chose to suppress that information.”
Editors' Note: May 2, 2009
A front-page article and headline on April 24 reported that the Global Climate Coalition, a group that throughout the 1990s represented industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, knew about the scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions could cause global warming but ignored it in a lobbying and public relations campaign against efforts to curb emissions.
The coalition, the article said, maintained publicly that scientists disagreed about whether greenhouse gases generated by humans could cause warming even after its own scientific advisory committee concluded that the evidence for the “potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”
The article cited a “backgrounder” that laid out the coalition’s public stance, published in the early 1990s and distributed widely to lawmakers and journalists. However, the article failed to note a later version of the backgrounder that included language that conformed to the scientific advisory committee’s conclusion. The later version was distributed publicly in 1998, but existed in some form as early as 1995, according to an online archive kept by Greenpeace. The amended version, which was brought to the attention of The Times by a reader, acknowledged the consensus that greenhouse gases could contribute to warming. What scientists disagreed about, it said, was “the rate and magnitude of the ‘enhanced greenhouse effect’ (warming) that will result.”
The coalition did, however, as the article reported, remove from an internal report by the scientific advisory committee a section that said that “contrarian” theories of why global temperatures appeared to be rising “do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.” After the later, amended version of the backgrounder was published, the coalition continued to question the scientific evidence that greenhouse gas emissions could heat the planet enough to justify sharp cuts in emissions. In the 1995 report, the advisory committee had concluded that “substantially higher atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases” constituted a “potential threat.”
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/science/earth/24deny.html?_r=1&ref=earth
Milwaukee, Wisconsin suffered an extreme invasion of cryptosporidium in 2000 when an unusal wind situation reversed the natural currents of Lake Erie and pushed water from the usual downstream flows into the city water system. It turns out that a company called Sara Lea has an abbatoir downstream and someone had inadvertantly??? diverted waste from the killing floor into storm drains. Hundreds of thousands were sickened and Sara Lea settled out of court where the information about the real cause of the outbreak was suppressed. Later, the city I live in, used a study of that outbreak which suggested the crypto came from the inability for chlorine to treat the highly turbid water from the lake. My city fathers accepted this report as proof that spring runoff is the cause of the problem we were having. The actual cause of the problem was 42 sources for fecal waste from upstream sources including the buildup of feedlots with thousands of animals within meters of the river. The point is much of what should be included in the dialogue of environmental issues and answers, is suppressed by the court system.
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ReplyDelete2. Chevron Pollution Investigation
3. This article discusses how Chevron reacted when "60 Minutes" planned to have a show uncovering pollution from oil companies in the Amazon Rain Forest. Chevron hired an ex-reporter to tell their side of the story in an attempt to salvage their image. It was a form of media defense. This shows the lengths of corruption that oil companies will go to in order to maintain continuous profit.
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When Chevron Hires Ex-Reporter to Investigate Pollution, Chevron Looks Good
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By BRIAN STELTER
Published: May 10, 2009
What did Chevron do when it learned that “60 Minutes” was preparing a potentially damaging report about oil company contamination of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador? It hired a former journalist to produce a mirror image of the report, from the corporation’s point of view.
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Report Says Chevron Owes Billions for Ecuadorean Pollution (April 3, 2008)
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As a demonstration of just how far companies will go to counteract negative publicity, the Chevron case is extraordinary. Gene Randall, a former CNN correspondent, spent about five months on the project, which was posted on the Internet in April, three weeks before the “60 Minutes” report was shown on May 3.
“Chevron hired me to tell its side of the story,” he said. “That’s what I did.”
The two videos — one by CBS, the other by a corporation being scrutinized by CBS — run about 14 minutes long. They each discuss a class-action lawsuit filed by Ecuadoreans who accuse Texaco, a company acquired by Chevron in 2001, of poisoning the rain forest.
An Ecuadorean judge is expected to rule soon on whether Chevron owes up to $27 billion in damages, which would make the case “the largest environmental lawsuit in history,” the “60 Minutes” correspondent, Scott Pelley, said.
Both videos start with a correspondent appearing on camera and calling it a “bitter” dispute. But from there, they diverge. The “60 Minutes” report visits the rain forest, talks to the Ecuadorean judge and interviews a Chevron manager. The Chevron video interviews the same Chevron manager, as well as five professors who are consultants to the oil company, but none of the plaintiffs.
The Chevron video never directly claims to be journalism. But a casual viewer could be swayed by the description — “Gene Randall reporting” — and the journalistic devices used, including file footage of the rain forest and over-the-shoulder interviews with experts. Chevron posted the video on YouTube as well as its own Web site devoted to the lawsuit.
Chevron declined to answer questions about the video. But in a statement, it said that “we produced this video in response to a campaign waged by trial lawyers. They’ve turned to Hollywood to tell a fictional story. We’ve turned to an award-winning, former journalist to tell a factual story.”
Mr. Randall, who has been a corporate consultant since leaving CNN in 2001, had worked with Chevron once before, as an interviewer of the company’s chief executive for a corporate Web video. When the company approached Mr. Randall late last year, he said he had researched the Ecuador lawsuit and “became convinced that their side had not gotten out there.”
The first Google search result for the words “Chevron in Ecuador” shows a Web site created by Amazon Watch, an environmental activist group, that blames “Chevron’s negligence” for injuries and deaths in the country. Chevron has since bought Google ads so that its Web site about the lawsuit, which includes Mr. Randall’s video, appears as a sponsored link.
Mitch Anderson, a campaigner for Amazon Watch, said that Chevron had resorted to “embarrassing public relations tactics” because credible news sources had not sufficiently framed the report the way they would like, namely, to “to place all of the blame for Texaco’s environmental disaster in Ecuador on PetroEcuador,” Texaco’s former partner.
Mr. Randall’s video acknowledges the claims of the plaintiffs many times, primarily to set up Chevron’s response. “This is not a news report,” he said in an interview. “This is a client hiring a provider to tell its side of the story.” The video ends with a voiceover saying “Gene Randall reporting.”
Jeff Fager, the executive producer of “60 Minutes,” said his staff would have liked the same access that Mr. Randall had to Chevron. The oil company’s chief environmental scientist appears in the corporate video, but “they wouldn’t let us interview her,” Mr. Fager said.
Mr. Fager emphasized that the “60 Minutes” segment was “well-reported and fair.”
“I’m sure that Chevron preferred the story they told to the one we told, but that’s not journalism, that’s advocacy,” he said.
Their advocacy may not have had a serious effect. While the “60 Minutes” report reached at least 12 million viewers on television, the Chevron-sponsored effort has received only about 2,000 views on YouTube. Chevron would not say how many views it had counted on its own Web site.
“Most companies like their own advertising best, and this is not a whole lot different,” Mr. Fager said.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/11/business/media/11cbs.html?_r=1
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