This photograph is of the Love Canal neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, where Hooker Chemical (now Occidental Petroleum Corporation) buried 21,000 tons of toxic, chemical waste:
In 1953, Hooker Chemical sold the land that they had been using for toxic waste disposal to the Niagara Falls School Board for $1. The sale deed contained warnings about the chemical waste and a disclaimer of liability. However, planners hastily built schools and homes on the contaminated land to accommodate the city’s growing postwar population. By the late 1970s, residents were reporting a litany of illnesses and birth defects. Scientists discovered high levels of carcinogens in the soil, groundwater, and air. The community mobilized to bring attention to the situation, and President Carter declared a federal health emergency in the area.
Elizabeth Blum, a professor of history at Troy University, has written about the environmental activism of Love Canal residents. Such activism, called “popular epidemiology,” attempts to link spikes in localized health issues to their origins. Despite such grassroots movements, though, the media tends to show little interest in the causes of cancer and greater interest in finding the cure.
The many “Stand Up to Cancer” ads, for example, urge people to donate money (or just use their credit card for purchases) to help fund the development of cancer treatments:
When media attention is focused on the causes of cancer, it usually takes an individualistic tone. Risk factors (smoking, poor diet, etc.) are blamed for various forms of cancer.
The thing is: there’s no money in prevention.
Mainstream media outlets have a vested interest in not exposing the causes of cancer. The companies that pay to advertise on their channels, and often their parent companies or subsidiaries, often traffic in known carcinogens. Pharmaceutical companies, likewise, have a perverse incentive. Healthy people make them no money, neither do dead people; sick people though, they’re a goldmine. Many organizations, including the multi-million dollar Susan G. Komen Foundation, are in the business of raising money “for the cure,” more so than prevention.
The politics of cancer, then suffer from the individualism characteristic of modern American and capitalist imperatives, leaving the causes of the cancer epidemic invisible and, accordingly, the unethical and illegal behavior of companies like Hooker Chemical.
Dan Rose is an assistant professor of sociology at Chattanooga State Community College in Tennessee. His research focuses on medical sociology and health inequalities in minority neighborhoods.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 13
LarryW — February 20, 2012
Look at the disaster the vaccine for polio caused "The March of Dimes" :)
Yrro Simyarin — February 20, 2012
Seem like it might have something to do with our social and psychological lack of logic when it comes to medical treatment. Treatment has always had a much higher value to it than prevention. People will spend hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money for another couple days of life, when they wouldn't spend $1,000 on a personal trainer earlier in life, even though the studies show the latter will be more effective.
Anonymous — February 21, 2012
Here's a great example of a corporation who traffics in carcinogens - Johnson & Johnson:
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2011-11-01/news/30347901_1_baby-products-johnson-s-baby-shampoo-johnson-johnson
So, they sell the most widely used baby shampoo, laden with formaldehyde, AND they make money off the back end, building machines to test for cancer and developing pharmaceuticals to treat it.
Anonymous — February 22, 2012
I wonder if part of the issue also might be that it's difficult to document the cause of any specific individual's cancer.
For example, prostate cancer has been linked to exposure to Agent Orange. Some percentage of men who served in Vietnam would have developed prostate cancer anyway -- but we can't identify (at this point) which cases are related to Agent Orange and which would've happened anyway, so they all are entitled to claim a service-connected disability.
A long-term, heavy smoker might assume zir lung cancer is related to smoking, but (unless you have a cluster of specific cancers in a specific geographic location) it's difficult for an individual to say, "*This* is what caused my cancer." So there's not the same kind of ... accountability, I guess?
It works for other health-related behaviors, too -- we know breastfeeding is linked to certain positive outcomes, but no one can say with certainty about a specific mother, "If Jane had breastfed, her 2nd-grader's IQ would be XX points higher."
Redpyramid — February 22, 2012
Actually I think you can make a lot of money in 'prevention' by inventing problems and needs. Advertisers of all kinds do it all the time. It is very easy to plant false ideas and fears (as this blog demonstrates).
I would suggest that the reason non-individualistic causes of cancer are not discussed is simply because the media outlets might have to implicate some large corporation or another because, like you said, it could put their advertisers in hot water, not necessarily because the corporations think they can make more money by poisoning people and then selling them the cure.
I would also be curious to see how the attitude of prevention vs 'treatment after-the-fact' differs in other areas of the globe. I always thought the emphasis on curing rather than preventing was more a North American concept.