Year after year, decade after decade, the public is made to believe that the battle against cancer is being won when in fact more people get and die of cancer today than ever before--far beyond population growth. The latest statistics show that an average of 187 Canadians die of cancer every day, an increase of 38 per cent in 17 years. SOURCE: Canadian Cancer Society (CCS). The incidence of cancer in Canada and the US doubled in 12 years from one in five in 1988 (The Cancer Industry, PP 33) to one in 2.5 in 2000 (Canadian Cancer Statistics PP 48).

In 1971 then US President Richard Nixon officially declared "war on cancer" and a cure was predicted within five to ten years. Now --33 years later-- we have a cancer epidemic instead of a cancer cure. Forty per cent of Canadians get cancer (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) and of those victims 64 per cent die of the disease (Statistics Canada). But cancer is not only a terrible disease, it is also a multi-billion dollar industry. As Dr. Deepak Chopra has pointed out more people make a living of cancer than die of it. Hence a cancer cure (especially an inexpensive one) would be about as welcome among cancer profiteers as a shark in a swimming pool. When a cancer drug has proven effective in treatment trials, but is considered not sufficiently profitable, production is stopped (Cancer: Taming the Beast CNN August 28, 2005).

The CCS raises about $110 million a year through various fundraising campaigns. There is a widely-held illusion that all this money goes to research to find a cancer cure. The facts are quite different. Only about 40 per cent of the money raised goes towards research and then only to research projects that are potentially profitable to the pharmaceutical industry. The rest goes to "salaries and benefits," (27 per cent), financing fundraising campaigns (12 per cent), with the balance covering miscellaneous expenditures (CCS).

According to the World Health Organization at least 80 per cent of all cancer is environmentally caused and can therefore be prevented, but having read the descriptions of dozens of cancer research projects the word PREVENTION was not in any of them. Moreover, the cancer establishment blocks any innovative research that has little or no potential fiscal benefit for pharmaceutical interests no matter how promising such research may be. It is interesting to note that while it is public knowledge how much politicians make, the incomes of CCS executives and researchers who also get paid out of public funds are confidential and are not disclosed. Obviously they should be.

Curiously, claims of medical breakthroughs in cancer research often coincide with fundraising campaigns, never to be heard of again. For example, the National Post in its April 1, 2000, edition devoted two full pages with a front-page intro on anti-angiogenesis treatment that was to be available by Christmas of that year and --gushed the Post-- "Painful chemotherapy may be a thing of the past." Simply put the treatment is based on cutting off the blood supply to tumours. Like interferon that was supposed to have saved Terry Fox’s life and interleukin-2 that was trumpeted as the summit of cancer research, anti-angiogenesis has also failed to live up to inflated expectations, but like all so-called cancer breakthroughs it proved to be a great fundraising tool. To understand the cancer industry’s dismal failure to reduce the overall incidence and mortality of cancer consider this:

If the billions of dollars spent on cancer research ($32 billion during the past 25 years in the US alone) had been effective and if all the so-called cancer-breakthroughs had been true, then obviously fewer and fewer people would get and die of cancer instead of more and more (far beyond population growth). Clearly the public is being misled by the cancer establishment. The future looks even worse. If present trends continue, new cancers are expected to increase 70 per cent by 2010 according to the CCS (April 1999 news release)

For the past half century conventional cancer treatment has remained limited to surgery, radiation and chemotherapy (also known as slash, burn and poison). The CCS's own statistics show that in most cases such conventional treatments fail. In fact, the consequences of cancer treatment are often worse than the disease itself and frequently hasten death rather than prevent it. A 33-year study by the late Dr. Hardin Jones, Professor of Medical Physics University of California, found that "untreated cancer victims live up to four times longer than treated individuals." (The Betrayal of Health by Dr. Joseph Beasley) The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet in its summer 1998 issue reported that studies have shown that lung cancer patients who undergo radiation therapy have a 20 per cent higher mortality rate than non-radiated ones. A McGill survey revealed that most doctors in Ontario would not accept chemotherapy for themselves or their family if THEY had lung cancer.....Cancer patients subjected to both chemotherapy and radiation get secondary tumours 25 times the normal rate (The Cancer Industry by Ralph Moss, Ph.D.) Misleading information is not limited to cancer treatment: it also applies to diagnosis. For example, mammography is widely believed to reduce the breast cancer mortality rate when in fact it increases the risk of inducing cancer. According to a study published in The Lancet (January 8, 2000) "for every 1000 women screened biennially throughout 12 years, one breast cancer death is avoided whereas the total number of deaths is increased by six.". Mammography subjects a patient to a radiation dose equivalent to 100 chest x-rays or 5000 milli-REM (Roentgen Equivalent Man), but according to a pamphlet produced by the BC Government the exposure is next to nothing, i.e. the same as received during a flight across Canada (5 milli-REM). In the meantime breast cancer mortality has remained virtually unchanged at around 30 per cent during the past 50 years while breast cancer incidence during the same period has nearly tripled from one in 20 to one in eight today.

Public ignorance about the politics of cancer is the result of widespread distortion and suppression of relevant facts by the cancer industry, most mainstream news media and government. As two-time Nobel Prize winner Dr. Linus Pauling put it "the war on cancer is largely a fraud." The veracity of that statement is widely substantiated by books such as: The Politics of Cancer Revisited by Dr. Samuel Epstein. The Betrayal of our Health by Dr. Joseph Beasley. The Cancer Industry by Ralph Moss Ph.D. The Cancer Wars by Prof. Robert Proctor. Cancer: Why We’re Still Dying to Know the Truth by Phillip Day. Patient no more - The Politics of Breast Cancer by Sharon Batt. See also: http://cancertruth.org

John Moelaert is a Victoria writer who has researched, spoken and written on the causes, prevention and politics of cancer since 1980. He is the author of The Cancer Conspiracy.
SEE: http:/members.shaw.ca/cancerconspiracy