Cancer fund to explore environmental links to illness

Martin Millelstaedt, Globe and Mail (Toronto)

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Non-profit agency looks to gather data on factors that remain under-researched

When it comes to funding cancer research, one study area almost always comes up short: finding out what might be changing in the environment that is leading more people to get the dreaded disease.
While tens of millions of dollars are spent annually in Canada on finding cancer cures, better drug treatments and understanding its genetic causes, only a tiny fraction of the research money is set aside for investigating possible environmental or pollution links to the disease.
To try to fill this gap, the Cancer Research Society plans to announce today in Toronto that it is setting up a new fund dedicated solely to investigating the role the environment plays in people developing the disease.
The society, a non-profit fundraising agency based in Montreal, wants to fund investigations into such factors as the contaminants seeping from waste dumps, hazardous chemicals in consumer products, and the radioactive radon gas found in many homes. It has also lined up prominent environmentalists to help it target the research priorities.

While cigarette smoke and ultraviolet sunlight are well known cancer-causing agents, "there is not much known about the other killers," CRS president Mario Chevrette says.
Dr. Chevrette says there are "probably links between the genome of the individual and the soup of chemicals in which he is living, or she is living," that can explain some cancers.
Among the cancers whose age-adjusted incidence rates have been increasing sharply in Canada in recent decades, and therefore might be linked to exposures to new types of environmental contaminants, are breast, testicular, prostate and thyroid, although experts caution that part of the rise in rates of some of these illnesses is due to earlier detection.
The subject of whether pollution is a big cause of cancer is hotly contested, with many environmentalists and some medical researchers convinced smokestack emissions, pesticides, plastics and many chemicals used in consumer products are leaving their fingerprints all over current cancer statistics.
But cancer organizations have traditionally played down worries about the environment, and have instead stressed the large role that lifestyle factors, such as smoking, exposure to the sun, physical inactivity and failure to eat enough fruit and vegetables, can play in driving the incidence of the disease.
The Canadian Cancer Society, for instance, says it believes at least half of all cancers can be prevented through lifestyle changes, with the biggest single step being to stop smoking.
In a publication on its website discussing pollution, the society says "current scientific evidence suggests that a small percentage of cancers are related to exposure to cancer-causing substances in the environment."
However, the organization is also interested in further research on the subject and this year helped back a $1-million effort to study occupational and environmental exposures to cancer-causing substances, along with lifestyle factors, to look for clues to cancer prevention.
Environmental factors, including what people eat, the pollutants in the air they breathe and lifestyle factors, are "responsible for a high percentage of the cancers that we get," Dr. Chevrette says.
If pollutants are causing some cancers, it will be important to pass regulations banning or restricting the chemicals responsible, once researchers have determined what they are.
There has been some research into possible environmental links that suggest they could be a major cause of some cancers.
In one such recent case, researchers announced this month that women in the Windsor area who developed breast cancer were three times more likely to have worked on farms at some point, and the risk increased further if women who farmed subsequently got jobs in automobile plants.
But the researcher who headed the project, Jim Brophy, an occupational disease expert, says he has found that agencies that fund cancer studies are seldom interested in looking at whether inadvertent exposures to pesticides or chemicals play a role in the development of the disease. "It's just not on the radar of cancer agencies to look at involuntary exposures," he says.
Some advocates for the eradication of cancer also want more study of the possible role environmental factors play in the disease.
Barry Stein, president of the Colorectal Cancer Association of Canada, says he is "very concerned about the environmental impact on colorectal cancer," citing such possible risk factors as occupation and where a person lives.
Two prominent environmentalists will also sit on the advisory board for the Cancer Research Society's new fund and help choose areas for study: Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence, and Ann Rowan, a director at the David Suzuki Foundation.

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