The Secret History of the War on Cancer

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Basic Books, 20 nov 2007 - 528 páginas
Why has the "War on Cancer" languished, focusing mainly on finding and treating the disease and downplaying the need to control and combat cancer's basic causes -- tobacco, the workplace, radiation, and the general environment? This war has targeted the wrong enemies with the wrong weapons, failing to address well-known cancer causes.

As epidemiologist Devra Davis shows in this superbly researched expose, this is no accident. The War on Cancer has followed the commercial interests of industries that generated a host of cancer-causing materials and products. This is the gripping story of a major public health effort diverted and distorted for private gain that is being reclaimed through efforts to green health care and the environment.

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Índice

The Secret History
3
Natural and Other Experiments
17
A Broad Enough Principle
45
Phantom Collaborators
73
Fear Sells
107
Making Goods out of Bads
141
Saving Cigarettes
169
The Good War
199
Cancer Doctoring
223
Deconstructing Cancer Statistics
245
Doctoring Evidence
267
The Harshest of Schoolmasters
297
No Safe Place
329
Chasing Tales
363
Presumed Innocent 391 Epilogue Mothers Last
437
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Página 51 - It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.
Página 67 - Crimes against humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecution on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.
Página 193 - The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
Página 191 - All scientific work is incomplete — whether it be observational or experimental. All .scientific work is liable to be upset or modified by advancing knowledge. That does not confer upon us a freedom to ignore the knowledge we already have, or to postpone the action that it appears to demand at a given time...
Página 329 - In the next 10 years we shall increase our wealth by 50 percent. The profound question is : Does this mean we will be 50 percent richer in a real sense, 50 percent better off, 50 percent happier? Or does it mean that in the year 1980 the President standing in this place will look back on a decade in which 70 percent of our people lived in metropolitan areas choked by traffic, suffocated by smog, poisoned by water, deafened by noise, and terrorized by crime?
Página 67 - CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.
Página 155 - We accept an interest in people's health as a basic responsibility, paramount to every other consideration in our business.
Página v - Is it safe?" Expediency asks the question, "Is it politic?" And vanity comes along and asks the question. "Is it popular?" But conscience asks the question, "Is it right?
Página 162 - The cigarette industry has been artfully maintaining that cigarette advertising has nothing to do with total sales. This is complete and utter nonsense. The industry knows it is nonsense. I am always amused by the suggestion that advertising, a function that has been shown to increase consumption of virtually every other product, somehow miraculously fails to work for tobacco products.
Página 329 - Clean air, clean water, open spaces — these should once again be the birthright of every American. If we act now, they can be. We still think of air as free. But clean air is not free, and neither is clean water. The price tag on pollution control is high. Through our years of past carelessness we incurred a debt to nature, and now that debt is being called.

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Sobre el autor (2007)

Devra Davis, PhD, MPH, directs Pittsburgh's Center for Environmental Oncology and is Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh. Contributor to the Nobel Peace Prize of 2007, she was founding director of the Board on Environmental Studies at the National Academy of Science and presidential appointee to the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. She is the acclaimed author of When Smoke Ran Like Water, Finalist for the National Book Award. She lives in Washington, D.C., and Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

www.DevraDavis.com

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