Selection 31

Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment

Sandra Steingraber

This article talks about the authors experience with cancer. She had bladder cancer when she was young and cancer runs in her adopted family. This is evidence that environmental factors can influence cancer. She talks in more detail about her family's history with cancer and that her mother who was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1974 and, to the surprise of her doctors, was still alive when this article was published. She then discusses when she first read about scientists identifying the gene responsible for human bladder cancer through transforming cancer DNA onto mice and pinpointing the exact alteration that caused the cancer to grow. It was determined that the cancer is caused by substitution of a double-ringed base called guanine for a single-ringed base called thymine. This would cause the cell to manufacture valine instead of the amino acid glycine. She then discuses findings of bladder cancer that came later which stated that people who have higher burdens of adducts than fast acetylators are at a greater risk of bladder cancer from exposure to aromatic amines. This includes more than half of the American and European population. We still don't know all suspected bladder carcinogens, their sources, how they interact with each other, and how we are exposed to them. There are certain jobs where people have been exposed to known carcinogens such as manufacturing rubber chemicals and pharmaceutical plants. What really concerns her is that almost a century after some of these findings we are still seeing some of these harmful carcinogens being manufactured, imported, used, and released into our environment. She believes that because we are obsessed with genes and heredity's influence in cancer we are not seeing that environmental factors are a cause of most cancers and have a large influence on genetic cancers as well. Rachel Carson urged recognition of an individuals right to know about poisons introduced into one's environment by others and the right to protect against them. To do this we first have to look at our ecological roots and determine what chemicals are already in our body's and environment. We then have to take a human rights approach when regulating how chemicals are used, released, disposed, and our unequal risks of being exposed to them. Toxic substances should not be used if there is another way of accomplishing the same task. This should be coordinated with active attempts to develop and make available affordable, nontoxic alternatives for currently toxic processes. We must save ourselves and the environment from the deliberate and routine release of chemical carcinogens.