ACSH expects to post on our webpage later today video from an interview Dr. Elizabeth Whelan did with CNN Sunday evening, discussing last week's scaremongering report from the President's Cancer Panel linking cancer to environmental chemicals. Maggie Fox of Reuters also wrote Sunday on the report, which she says has "underwhelmed most mainstream cancer experts and drawn only a puzzled response from the White House."
Fox's Reuters piece quotes Dr. Graham Colditz of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis as saying the panel's findings "distracts us, as a society, from actually acting on the things that are already in our grasp. I can take tobacco as the best example" — more than one in five Americans still smoke despite nearly a half-century of cancer warnings.
"Maybe up to 4 percent of cancer in the western world is caused by contaminants and pollution and yet we are chasing new, unknown causes rather that focusing on acting on what we know," Colditz adds. "Things like this report are making it harder to move the nation to a healthier lifestyle."
"Kudos to Maggie Fox for a rather well-balanced report pointing out the unscientific assertions in this report," says Dr. Whelan, who has read the entire 200-plus pages of the document in its entirety and was struck by how many times it mentioned BPA.
"The one thing we know for sure is that BPA does not cause cancer!" says ACSH's Dr. Gilbert Ross, who notes that even activists who use dubious studies to blame the chemical for a host of other ills don't make that assertion.