Devra Davis , "Presumed Innocent "

Devra Davis is an environmental health expert who both directs the Center for Environmental Oncology at the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and teaches epidemiology at the university’s graduate program in public health. In The Secret History of the War on Cancer, she draws upon her years of epidemiological study to conclude that “the cancer war has been fighting the wrong battles, with the wrong weapons, against the wrong enemies” and that there have been “over 10 million preventable cancer deaths over the past thirty years.”

In her critique, Davis targets the chemical, pharmaceutical, food, and health care industries that benefit from the public’s continuing ignorance of the environmental factors that lead to cancer. She faults the government for creating a judicial environment that “make[s] the burden of proof close to impossible when it comes to human harm and environmental contamination,” thereby all but eliminating the possibility of using the legal system to prevent cancer through the prosecution of the producers of carcinogenic substances. The combined influence of industrial secrecy and government reticence to act has created a decades-long “war on cancer” that focuses  on treatment after the fact, rather than on prevention.

Davis’s call to reconsider public policy regarding environmental sources for cancer is particularly timely in an era when “half of all men and a third of all women in developed nations will contract the disease, and more than one in four of their citizens will die from it.” Encounters with cancer are not random: they are highly determined by the quality of one’s surroundings which are, inevitably, also a function of one’s social and economic status. “Rates of prostate, breast, and colo-rectal cancer are…much higher in blacks than whites,” Davis point out and the root cause of this, she argues, may be found in the fact that “one in three [black Americans] works in a blue collar job, and one in five lives within two miles of a hazardous waste site.”  For Davis, cancer must be understood in the context of the countless variables ignored in contemporary approaches to “fighting” the disease. Cancer-free living will remain out of reach as long as we turn our attention away from the chemical substances that now permeate our living spaces and find their way into our bodies.

This multi-variant approach to cancer invites a general re-examination of how we conceive of illness. How would public policy change if we began to look at cancer and other diseases as consequences of the world we have shaped for ourselves rather than the whim of genetics or the twist of fate? In order to be effective, is it necessary that public health policy become a form of social engineering, with economics and urban planning part of its purview? In order to be successful, must the “war on cancer” ultimately be a war against trade secrecy and against poverty as well?

Davis, Devra . The Secret History of the War on Cancer. Basic Books, 2007.

Quotations come from “The war on cancer, cont’d,” an editorial by Davis in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; a summary of The Secret History of the War on Cancer at the Environmental Oncology Institute’s site; and the author’s own web site.

Digital image drawn from the Women's Leadership Exchange site.

Link to Explore:

Writer's Voice : A podcast interview with Devra Davis on Aspartame and Ritalin.

A Salon interview with Devra Davis.

IT Coversations: A podcast interview with Devra Davis.

Question for Connecting:

• Edward Tenner assures us, in spite of all the complications, that progress “comes in by the back door.” In making this claim, he seems to believe that a self-correcting process will usually operate, with “intensity” followed by “disaster,” which produces “precaution” and finally “vigilance.” Is this argument confirmed, extended, complicated, or refuted by Davis’ description of current research on cancer? Does Davis’ argument that corporate concerns influence this research show that technology’s self-correcting tendencies have been derailed in this instance? Are financial considerations necessarily at odds with the development of scientific knowledge?

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