reviewed by Shirley Farlinger

Under the Radar: Cancer and the Cold War by Ellen Leopold. 2009: Rutgers University Press

Knowing, as we do, the close connection between radiation and cancer, doesn’t it seem strange that so little progress has been made? This book offers an explanation. The material is all from the United States but it probably applies to Canada as well. Rosalie Bertell was one of the author’s advisors.

“Cancer had become a by-product of atomic weaponry, a seed sown in a mushroom cloud that could grow anywhere on earth in any season.” Few Americans were aware of this.

During the Cold War the US thought it was necessary to keep testing their nuclear weapons. The possession of nuclear bombs seemed to the strategists a guarantee of military superiority. To keep the industry going it was necessary to test. This required an insistence that the radiation would not be harmful to humans. The long latency period of cancer assisted in covering up the connection.

A healthy male was chosen as the norm for setting allowable doses. The tests sought to establish an official level of radiation that would still allow the testing to continue without further public concern. But as the public continued to be concerned the acceptable level was lowered and continues to be lowered but not below what we now know to still be harmful.

To legitimize the nuclear industry, ways were sought to try to make nuclear technology beneficial to people. First it was the Cobalt-60 treatment for cancer, since rejected as more harmful than helpful, then it was other radiation treatments and medical tests. Now it is food irradiation. Some treatments did not involve informed consent and if the information available is still wrong how can consent be called informed?

At the same time nuclear power was touted as a great advantage for safe, clean, reliable and cheap energy. As Rosalie points out, this provided a cover for the less attractive nuclear weapons.

Responsibility for cancer was put onto individuals. They smoked, or drank, or ate too much, or were under stress. The book shows that surveys indicated that none of these factors affected the cancer rates, which continue to climb.

The objective of treating cancer was pursued because it is more profitable to treat cancer than to prevent it. From society’s and the victim’s point of view prevention would be much cheaper as well as more humane. The cost to society of cancer is huge, but in the US it was the chance to make money that mattered. Government was deregulated, oversight discouraged and industries left to self-monitor. “Victims are not just blameless, they are powerless … Strategies such as rigorous control of industrial pollution have virtually disappeared.”

The New England Journal of Medicine concluded that “some 35 years of intense effort focused largely on improving treatment must be judged a qualified failure … the way forward lay in cancer prevention rather than in treatment.”

The situation should be better in Canada, with a public health system, but as the next book shows this may not be the case.

Corrupt to the Core: Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower by Shiv Chopra. 2009: KOS Publishing Inc.

It is a tangled web Dr. Chopra describes in recounting his experience working for Health Canada for 36 years. The first struggle was to rise to a management position that he was constantly denied, even when he was much more qualified than those promoted. It came to the question of whether a man of Indian origin could follow the “North American way of doing business” that managers were expected to follow. That seemed to be where the department’s own scientists pass products of questionable safety such as growth hormones, genetically modified organisms, pesticides, antibiotics and drugs to be used in food-producing animals. But the large companies, such as Monsanto, were interested in fast-tracking their latest products and were willing to bribe officials to get their way.

A lengthy grievance assisted by the unions proved that racism was a negative factor in Dr. Chopra’s career.

The next fight was to stop the onslaught from the big companies to ignore the Food and Drug Act an Act that must be upheld by all government agencies and politicians.

“There was little that any regulatory scientists could do to counteract the massive money-mad policy of the Government of Canada.” No matter how high up the ladder the cases went, the result was the same. On one side were Maude Barlow, David Suzuki, Vandana Shiva and Paul Dewar MP. On the other were David Dodge, Alan Rock, and Jean Chretien.

Dr Chopra and other “whistleblowers” were wrongfully dismissed in 2004 and are still pursuing the right to return to full employment. Just his record on preventing Mad Cow Disease, reporting on anthrax, and warning about vaccines should put him back in Health Canada.

In April 2008, Paul Dewar MP presented Dr. Chopra’s “Five Pillars of Food Safety” to Parliament as a blueprint for government policy.

Although the book does not deal with the health effects of radiation, there is every reason to suppose that Health Canada is subject to the same pressures from the nuclear industry as they have been from the chemical industries. Let us hope for other whistleblowers who can help us uphold our commitment to “concern for public health.”