Cancer Clusters

Paul Voosen has an interesting article at National Geographic that wonders why there has not been more known cancer clusters develop given the nation’s long history of toxicity. There’s no shortage of the skeptic in Voosen and so the article in places reads like someone who really doesn’t believe toxicity may be that great of worry. That concerns me because we do know that toxicity and pollution can cause powerful and horrible things to happen to human bodies. The large historiographies of workplace health, toxicity, women’s bodies, and the history of science plainly demonstrates this in broad terms. But the fact remains that there are not a lot of officially designated cancer clusters as was predicted in the 1970s. Is this because we don’t study this issue enough? Is it because of corporate influence over science? Is it because Americans move around so much? Is it because people respond to outside influences on their bodies in different ways, making it hard to verify? Is it because cancer is just so common anyway that we aren’t really seeing when toxicity causes it? Or is the impact of toxic materials on human health overstated? I am pretty skeptical of the last possibility, but I think the answer to why the cancer clusters haven’t been recognized may be a combination of several of the above factors.

In any case, protecting humans from toxic waste is not something that should be up for debate. It’s important and the resources to clean up the environment and make humans safe are a necessary expenditure. There is far too much clear historical evidence before the environmental laws of the 1970s to make us question that.