This seems like an exaggeration. I would like to see a link to the article/report that shows this data
what do you expect from hyperbole anyway? It's a point well-made.
On one side we have some herd-manager-class alarmists working hard to focus more resources on their little slice of our overgrown government. I wouldn't just imply that Dal does not have justification for his concerns, though, if he lacks some balance when reading the articles generated from the community of concerned scientists whose noses are deep in the research or treatment of cancer.
On the other hand, we have some equally well-educated folks of all kinds. . . in Franklin's case I think being informed and also having some common sense, enough to resist the drive of some alarmist articles.
A researcher in cancer from fifty years ago, who ultimately died of cancer himself, used to quip about how if you don't die of anything else, you'll die of cancer for sure. He made it to age 82 or so.
Still, it is important for us to consider the implications of the things we are doing. Sure we do diagnose cancer pretty effectively. A lot of people get killed in car wrecks while they have cancer, too, or die of something else like a heart attack with undetected cancer as well. Some rioters who get shot by cops have cancer, too. Anyone who doesn't understand the nature of medical statistics might have some unrealistic expectations or ideas of what we should do. I think we could allow for incompleteness of data and bias of data appropriately, and still obtain the result that we have a cancer epidemic, as well as a diabetes epidemic, and an obesity epidemic, and several other epidemics going on which arise not from pathogenic viruses, infectious agents, or other "natural" causes, but from our impacts on our environment with toxic chemicals being released in the air, into the water, or buried in the ground, or mined out of the ground. In addition, I think we have epidemics ongoing as the consequence of prescribed medicines both for home use or administered in hospitals, some proportion of which are from wrong diagnoses, and others from simply the side effects of our medicines. In addition, I think we are generating epidemics with our food processing practices, and our food packaging practices.
A long time ago I studied multiple sclerosis. I think I read every published report that dealt with "multiple sclerosis" in the index medicus going back fifty years. A lot of the studies were epidemiology studies, just compiling data on the people who were diagnosed with it. It seemed to be a disease that only occurs in developed countries. Questioning that, some folks went out into the hinterlands looking for people who might not have been able to go to a doctor about it. Some went to the jungles of Africa and Southeast Asia. Others went to remote fishing villages in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Some went to India, others to China.
Some went looking for people in rural America with MS, too. Over the years, they saw the MS rates change everywhere, when the water supplies were developed and kept clean. Yep. Chlorination of drinking water causes MS.
Well, it might take an idiot to just think it's that simple, even if there's a lot of data that would support the idea. You could say eating fish prevents MS, too, from the stats. You could say stress causes MS, too. You could also say there's a genetic factor because people who are related to someone diagnosed with MS is several times more likely to get it. Direct contact between MS sufferers and unrelated people doesn't impose a risk on the unrelated folks, though, so it's probably not just "transmitted" somehow. You could also say getting the measles increases your risk for MS, or getting vaccinated for Measles even.
So anyway, I concluded that chlorination of water results in chlorinated organic stuff in the water, and the excess chlorine damages lipids in living tissues as well, principally affecting the lipids in cell membranes, and thus altering the vital membrane chemistry of receptors and the response to antigens and the binding of antigens. It therefore has a rational basis for being considered as factor in autoimmune disease and cancer, and a variety of other disorders in our health. It does not kill you like it kills single-celled bacteria, but it creates a population of abnormal cells in all tissues of the body where it either acts directly or acts upon the lipid supplies needed for building cell membranes.
I think Dal is on to something with the cancer epidemic. We are using Bisphenol-A as a plasticizer in our plastic wrap and our plastic bottles. Bisphenol-A, and range of other plasticizers, are "phytoestrogens" which means that they mimic some effects of estrogen. Some cancers are known to be fed by too much estrogen, or other hormonal imbalances. A lot of this in our food could effectively feminize males, too. It's been seen in some frogs in particularly affected water areas where chemicals like this have been dumped.
I might take a dim view of some "herd-manager" types of bureaucrats in some respects, but we do need to track our health and look for causes in the way we are doing stuff, and we need some bureaucrats who will just say "No" to some of our practices that are having effects on our health.
I don't know what we can do to replace chlorine as a water treatment in our water plants, but we can install home systems for purifying water and removing the chlorinated chemicals and the chlorine. And we can design bottles with a plastic layer inside the glass, like our car windshields, and a glass layer to prevent leakage of plasticizers into our drinks. These would be some good business I could start, if I could get someone to help me work out a business plan. . . .
It's easier to exploit the problems systemically created by other industries and even government bureaucrats and privately develop an answer to the problem, and take it to the market. . .. than change societal systems wholesale.
