Environmental Risks

With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to cancer, the public is becoming increasingly aware of the unacceptable burden of cancer resulting from environmental and occupational exposures that could have been prevented through appropriate national action…

To jumpstart this national effort, the President’s Cancer Panel [the Panel] dedicated its 2008 – 2009 activities to examining the impact of environmental factors on cancer risk…

The Panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated.  With nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market in the United States, many of which are used by millions of Americans in their daily lives and are un- or under- studied and largely unregulated, exposure to potential environmental carcinogens is widespread.  One such ubiquitous chemical, bisphenol A [BPA], is still found in many consumer products and remains unregulated in the United States, despite the growing link between BPA and several diseases, including various cancers…

Environmental exposures that increase the national cancer burden do not represent a new front in the ongoing war on cancer.  However, the grievous harm from this group of carcinogens has not been addressed adequately by the National Cancer Program.  The American people — even before they are born — are bombarded continually with myriad combinations of these dangerous exposures.

– In the letter addressed to the U.S. President, attached to the 2008 – 2009 Annual Report to the U.S. President titled Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now, created by the President’s Cancer Panel

Single-gene inherited cancer syndromes are believed to account for less than 5% of malignancies in the United States.  An unknown percentage of cancers develop due to normal endogenous (internal) processes.  For example, cellular detoxification processes can produce oxygen radicals that damage DNA.  Aging cells tend to make more errors in DNA replication than younger cells, and some DNA copying errors are inevitable due to the sheer volume of replication that occurs every day.

Other cancers develop as a result of exogenous (outside of the body) factors, some of which are controllable.  It is now known exactly what percentage of all cancers either are initiated or promoted by an environmental trigger.  Some exposures to an environmental hazard occur as a single acute episode, but most often, individual or multiple harmful exposures take place over a period of weeks, months, years, or a lifetime.  However, susceptibility to cancers resulting from environmental exposures may be inherited if a parent is exposed to a carcinogen that causes germ cell genetic changes, which subsequently are passed on to a child.

– Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now (2008 – 2009) by the President’s Cancer Panel; page 1 – 2

“… genes and environment interact in ways that are so complex that it’s really not worth arguing in my mind about how much plays what role because… we cannot change our ancestors.  So a rational place to begin a program of cancer prevention [is]… with the environment, and lifestyle is wound up in the environment.”

– Sandra Steingraber of Ithaca College; – Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now (2008 – 2009) by the President’s Cancer Panel; page 2