THE CURE FOR ALL ADVANCED CANCERS
For instance, suppose you are the Food And Drug Admini-
stration (FDA) and “The Big Corporation” wants you to allow
their new additive, saccharin , in food. It’s a miracle substance,
says The Big Corporation, a substance that sweetens without
calories! Millions of people will benefit! So being a conscien-
tious FDA policy maker, you diligently check the IARC
Evaluations and find that saccharin is classified in “Group 2B.”
This means that it is “possibly carcinogenic to humans.”^88 So
impartial scientists have no proof saccharin is carcinogenic,
points out The Big Corporation, so it wouldn’t be legal for you
to deny approval. As an FDA official, you decide the “fair” de-
cision is to allow saccharin to be used (as actually occurred).
But as the parent of a six month old baby, would you let her eat
food sweetened with saccharin?
Agencies and committees like the FDA, IARC, and others,
can be expected to be very, very conservative; certainly not bi-
ased against any particular chemical. But where safety is the
issue, an evaluation committee should be biased (in favor of
safety). This bias would change the language used by the com-
mittee. For instance, an unbiased committee would consider
carbon tetrachloride as possibly carcinogenic (because not
enough human experiments were done, although animal ex-
periments definitely showed cancer induction^89 ) whereas the
safety-biased committee would consider it probably or undoubt-
edly carcinogenic (because some human experiments were done
and these showed cancer induction besides the results from
animals).
I think the IARC working group has failed. Despite their
distinguished personnel, they have made a classification system
that confuses and demoralizes the public that relies upon it.
Their Group 1 category, which lists agents that “are carcino-
genic to humans,” has both benzene (indisputably carcinogenic)
and nickel (used in our coinage and stainless steel cookware and
(^88) IARC Monographs on the Evaluation of Carcinogenic Risks to Humans, volumes 1
to 42, Supplement 7, World Health Organization, 1987, p. 43.
(^89) Ibid., pp. 32, 43.