Presentation set from Advancing Green Chemistry
July 22, 2010 at 10:22 am | Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Advancing Green Chemistry recently ran a crash-course in environmental health sciences, about shifts in approach to toxicology, and why green chemists need this information to design the next generation of safer chemicals.
The presentations are very interesting and available for download at the AGC website. You can also subscribe to their newsletter, here.
Top US cancer panel says chemicals causing “grievous harm”
May 20, 2010 at 4:01 pm | Posted in Briefing | Leave a Comment
Coverage of the US PCP report in USA Today (click to view story, external link)
The US President’s Cancer Panel (PCP), charged with monitoring the national Cancer Program, recently surprised a lot of people working around harm to health from environmental chemicals with their most recent biannual report.
This is because it is the first time the PCP has focused on environmental causes of cancer, stating that “the true burden of environmentally induced cancers has been grossly underestimated” and strongly urging action to reduce widespread exposure to carcinogens.
The panel also criticised regulators and industry for using “woefully outdated” estimates of environmentally caused cancers to set regulations and “to justify its claims that specific products pose little or no cancer risk.”
The PCP is currently a two-member panel: Dr. LaSalle D. Lefall, Jr., a professor of surgery at Howard University and Margaret Kripke, a professor at University of Texas’ M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. They were appointed by President Bush, not President Obama.
The report brings the PCP into line with organisations including the Endocrine Society (ES), which published in 2009 a Scientific Statement voicing strong concern about potential harm from endocrine disrupting chemicals in the environment and consumer products, and the American Medical Association, which in 2008 passed resolutions stating that more attention needs to be paid to environment as a cause of illness and for medical professionals to receive more education in this area, and endorsed the ES concerns about endocrine disruptors.
The Lancet commented on the PCP report: “Cancer prevention must remain a top priority for the soon to be appointed director of the US National Cancer Institute. The federal government should impose and enforce stronger environmental laws which will decrease regulatory complexity, reduce industry’s influence, and encourage research directed toward the health effects of low doses of a combination agents.”
There is an enormous body of research (mostly animal and epidemiological, due to the ethical impossibility of doing RCTs in this area) linking environmental exposures to chemicals with cancer and a range of other diseases. Since 1970, age-adjusted rates of many cancers have increased drastically (e.g. rates of NHL and prostate have tripled).
The American Cancer Society was less than delighted with the PCP report (though Medscape Today points out this is not representative of the full range of opinion across the ACS), accusing the PCP of being “unbalanced” and diverting attention away from known causes, while implying environmental exposures are not a “modifiable” risk.
Critics of the ACS have raised questions over conflict of interest and robust defences of the PCP have been mounted by the former chairman of the Sierra Club and the CEO of the Breast Cancer Fund.
H&E – as seen in
The Journal of the San Francisco Medical Society, April 2010
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Health & Environment
Health & Environment is a website and monthly free publication about how environmental contaminants affect human health.H&E is published by the Cancer Prevention and Education Society.
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Limits of genomics – the context for a new “enviromics”?
June 24, 2010 at 10:47 am | Posted in Comment | Leave a Comment"Enviromics": can techniques for determining which parts of the genome are responsible for certain diseases also be applied to environmental influences? (Picture: The first printed edition of the human genome at the Wellcome Collection, London. By Russ London at en.wikipedia.org)
There is an interesting piece in the NYT about how, in the ten years since completion of the human genome, not much seems to have happened in terms of connecting common genetic variants with health outcomes. Researchers are now looking at rare variants instead.
Philosophically, it’s interesting that the move from common variants to rare variants is described by McClellan and King as a “paradigm shift” – normally, the expression is reserved for completely new ways of looking at a problem, the terms of which are more-or-less incompatible with the old approach (the classic example being the move from Newtonian physics to Relativity Theory).
In that context, simply examining uncommon variants rather than common variants in the genome seems much less revolutionary – though that’s not to say it’s not a good idea!
More radical is the “enviromics” concept, published very recently, of applying analytical methods from genomics to human/environment interactions, determining the differences, and mapping these onto health outcomes – to us, it looks not entirely unlike like turbo-charged epidemiology.
There is an article on this in the most recent H&E here (see second article).