Are we winning the 'war on cancer'?

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18 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1985 We welcome letters from readers addressed to Steve concerning his articles and including suggestions for future articles-The editors.

One third of all babies born in the United States in 1985 will develop cancer during their lifetimes according to an article in the January/February 1985 issue of Ca—A Cancer Journal for Clinicians. This is an increase of 8 percent over cancer rates projected in 1978, a shocking 1 percent projected increase per year.

The authors, all in the Department of Epidemiology of the American Cancer Society, utilized data from the most recent SEER report. SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Result) is :Cannon on health:

"The people will have ambition, under socialism, to explore the great universe and to unlock its secrets, and to extract from their knowledge new resources for the betterment of all the people.

They will nroanize an all nut war dry wu viğauce au all-vul wai against sickness and disease, and there will be a flowering of the great science of medicine. They will look back with indignation, when they read in their history books that at one time people had to live in a socicly wicic litie was a suvilagt ul ati whore thare unan chantnan ni doctors, artificially maintained.

I believe it can be said with certainty that among the heroes of the new society, whom the youth will venerate, will be doctors of all kinds who will really be at the service of man in the struggle for the conquest of those diseases which lay him low.

Man's health will be a major concern, and sickness and disease a disgrace, not to the victim, but to the society which permits it."

-from a 1953 speech by James P.

Cannon printed in America's Road to Socialism, Pathfinder Press. an ongoing National Cancer Institute (NCI) program to track the incidence of cancer and the survival or cure rates.

Frightening as their projection is, the actual picture is somewhat worse. The authors of the article only include the most deadly forms of cancer. Skin cancers, for example, are not included in the SEER report. If all forms of cancer were included in the totals, the projected incidence rates would be much higher.

Winning the "war?"

Grim statistics like these are often discounted in the popular press because, supposedly, the "war on cancer" is being won. Such reports tend to create a sense of security in people-allaying their fears. To some extent, this is the purpose of such reports.

Unfortunately there is little truth in their assertions. Although the cure rate for some types of cancer has gone up dramatically, "overall cancer mortality is going up, according to John Bailar of the Harvard School of Public Health.

Gina Kolata points out in the Aug. 9, 1985, issue of Science magazine that the age-adjusted cancer mortality rate has increased in the last 20 years. The death rate from cancer was 170.2 deaths per 100,000 people in 1962 and it stood at 185.1 per 100,000 in 1982.

Kolata also asserts that the oft-quoted increase in the five-year survival rate for patients with many types of cancer may be more apparent than real. Much of this increase in survival time may be due to a phenomenon known as the "lead-time effect" and may actually be more related to improvements in diagnosis rather than treatment.

If a cancer is diagnosed earlier, the patient will seem to live longer, regardless of the effectiveness of the treatment. If treatment success unchanged, earlier diagnosis does nothing to extend the life of the patient, but it does improve the survival statistics.

More people are living longer after their cancer is diagnosed, but their actual lifetime is unchanged. Recent lung and breast cancer studies described in the Science article show this lead-time effect.

A "gentlemanly" discussion John Cairns, also at the Harvard School of Public Health, told Kolata that there has been no significant increase in the survival rates from any of the major forms of cancer since the 1950s. Kolata quotes him as saying that the reality is so discouraging that it is difficult to discuss the situation in public.

"That is why this dispute lover success in treating cancer] is carried on in such a gentlemanly way, Cairns told her. "People do get cancer and they have to be given encouragement. Research has to go on."

Wait. Do we want to keep this discussion on a "gentlemanly" level? Definitely not!

I believe this notion of special knowledge and special expert competence is part and parcel of the governing methods of the U.S. ruling class. People are we are incompetent to understand factors that concern our very life and health.

Rather, I think we are all too competent to deal with complex questions such as these for the ruling class to keep their peace of mind! Does any reader not grasp the horror of one baby in three growing up and developing cancer? Do you need an advanced degree to understand the implications of an increase, not a decrease, in the cancer death rate?

Blame the victim

Just as individuals are often blamed for their own diseases, so too are workers blamed for the decline of U.S. industry. If you develop cancer it must be your lifestyle or heredity that is at fault, not the system that encourages the discharge of hundreds of tons of carcinogens and toxins into the environment.

If you lose your job it is not because of capitalist inefficiency or deindustrialization in the search for superprofits, it is because you are a poor worker.

This "blame the victim" ideology is a very powerful weapon for the ruling class. It makes us doubt our ability to make changes in our lives. It hides the true sources of our problems.

A sense of fatalism is also encouraged. Cancer is considered the price of modern industrial society. Even if we tried to improve conditions it would mean the loss of jobs.

Some recent research indicates that people who see their lives as meaningful and productive have healthier immune systems than people who are depressed or alienated. The immune system is the body's first line of defense against disease or cancer cells. Perhaps by making a world where we are all engaged in work we find meaningful, we will have won a major victory against cancer.

But even short of such a revolutionary change, one can actually do a great deal to fight back against cancer. Not only are there lifestyle factors which can help, but we can become informed about pollution hazards and organize to eliminate them. This will be the subject of next month's column.