Received this via email a few days ago...

Published on Friday, December 8, 2006 by the _Guardian_
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/) / UK

Renowned Cancer Scientist Was Paid by Chemical Firm for 20 Years

by Sarah Boseley
A world-famous British scientist failed to disclose that he held a paid consultancy with a chemical company for more than 20 years while investigating cancer risks in the industry, the Guardian can reveal.

Sir Richard Doll

Sir Richard Doll, the celebrated epidemiologist who established that
smoking causes lung cancer, was receiving a consultancy fee of $1,500 a day in the mid-1980s from Monsanto, then a major chemical company and now better known for its GM crops business.

While he was being paid by Monsanto, Sir Richard wrote to a royal Australian commission investigating the potential cancer-causing properties of Agent Orange, made by Monsanto and used by the US in the Vietnam war. Sir Richard said there was no evidence that the chemical caused cancer.

Documents seen by the Guardian reveal that Sir Richard was also paid a £15,000 fee by the Chemical Manufacturers Association and two other major companies, Dow Chemicals and ICI, for a review that largely cleared vinyl chloride, used in plastics, of any link with cancers apart from liver cancer - a conclusion with which the World Health Organisation disagrees. Sir Richard's review
was used by the manufacturers' trade association to defend the chemical for more than a decade.

The revelations will dismay scientists and other admirers of Sir Richard's pioneering work and fuel a rift between the majority who support his view that the evidence shows cancer is a product of modern lifestyles and those environmentalists who argue that chemicals and pollution must be to blame for soaring cancer rates.
Yesterday Sir Richard Peto, the Oxford-based epidemiologist who worked closely with him, said the allegations came from those who wanted to damage Sir Richard's reputation for their own reasons. Sir Richard had always been open about his links with industry and gave all his fees to Green College, Oxford, the postgraduate institution he founded, he said. Professor John Toy, medical director of Cancer Research UK, which funded much of Sir Richard's work, said times had changed and the accusations must be put into context. "Richard Doll's lifelong service to public health has saved millions of lives. His pioneering work demonstrated the link between smoking and lung cancer and paved the way towards current efforts to reduce tobacco's death toll," he said. "In the days he was publishing it was not automatic for potential conflicts of interest to be declared in scientific papers." But a Swedish professor who believes that some of Sir Richard's work has led
to the underestimation of the role of chemicals in causing cancers said that transparency was all-important. "It's OK for any scientist to be a consultant to anybody, but then this should be reported in the papers that you publish," said Lennart Hardell of University Hospital, Orebro. Sir Richard died last year. Among his papers in the Wellcome Foundation library archive is a contract he signed with Monsanto. Dated April 29 1986, it extends for a year the consulting agreement that began on May 10 1979 and
offers improved terms. "During the one-year period of this extension your consulting fee shall be $1,500 per day," it says.
Monsanto said yesterday it did not know how much work Sir Richard did for the company, but said he was an expert witness for Solutia, a chemical business spun off from Monsanto, as recently as 2000.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006
###

No information in this letter should be construed as medical advice.
This information is for educational purposes only.

There was much more on Doll in recent usenet thread, which includes the original devastating investigative report by the UK legal group Injurywatch. The stuff in the mass media is merely an attempt of damage control. Doll was shown to be complete scientific fraud, a master of blame-the-victim pseudo-science on behalf of whoever happened to be paying him at the moment. A real life Dr. Faustus. Incidentally, he is the guy who started the whole antismoking pseudoscience in 1950s (on behalf of UK & US governments).

Hmmm... Very interesting stuff.

I am aware of the smear campaign against the sun as it is being falsely accused of causing skin cancer. I have studied volumes of other cover-ups as well. The more you study the more you realize that a lot of what we (the public) think we know is not true and in fact, in many cases, the opposite is true.

Oh how I cannot wait for a day when truth prevails. What a day it will be.

Thanks for the info. Feel free to keep it coming because I'll make whatever time I can to check it out.

There is a scientific paper "Cancer Trends During the 20th Century" published in the Journal of the Australasian College of Nutritional & Environmental Medicine, Vol. 21, No. 1, April 2002, pages 3-8. It shows interesting graphs for cancer deaths (mostly in Sweden which had good quality records) over most decades of 20th century:

<img src="http://www.acnem.org/images/journal/21-1_april_2002/21-1_halberg-fig_3.gif">
Figure 3. Skin melanoma mortality in Sweden since 1912.

<img src="http://www.acnem.org/images/journal/21-1_april_2002/21-1_halberg-fig_4.gif">
Figure 4. Lung cancer death rates in Sweden.

It shows clearly simultaneous rapid rise in the rates for both types of cancers in the fifties, just as the atmospheric nuclear tests (especially in neighboring USSR) were reaching their peak (these tests were banned not long after the cancer rates rise started). The skin and lungs would be particularly sensitive to airborne radioactive particles, hence the rates of these two cancers show high degree of temporal correlation. Note also how there is another little upward jolt in the rates, especially striking for melanoma rates, in late 1980s, right after the Chernobyl nuclear plant meltdown. In the article they also show how this same correlation (between melanoma & lung cancer) manifests in spatial dimension as well, when data is compared by counties in Sweden, which is to be expected since the air current patterns would deposit radioactive fallout differently at different locations.

Another interesting bit buried in the paper is how the statistics around this critical period were difficult to get from the government "health" bureaucrats and how the more recent official way of counting the cancer death rates, the so called 'age adjusted mortality', is artificially making the increase appear smaller (citing discussion after Fig 13):

" First of all, data before 1955 has always been locked out from publicly available databases. Secondly, and even worse, trends for obviously exposure-time-dependent cancers are effectively neutralised by use of age-standardised ratios (ASR). This procedure assumes that the increasing cancer incidence is a natural effect of growing old and thus the age standardised mortality will stay the same although the population gets older. By doing this, the responsible institutions can show to the authorities that the mortality is in control and in effect not increasing at all despite the fact that it is. "

This same statistical gimmick with 'age adjusted rates' was also used by CDC to hide the fact that lung cancers in USA have been on the rise for decades, being now at their maximum, even though the smoking has been declining also for decades, being at its minimum now. The sneaky little mathematical trick of scaling the rates for different years using different multipliers, made the actual increase appear as a small decrease in the "new math" (since they multiplied the rates of more recent years with smaller factors), which CDC "scientists" then attributed to the decline in smoking rates.

Further the asthma rates rose precisely as the smoking declined (and vaccinations increased):

<img src="http://www.acnem.org/images/journal/21-1_april_2002/21-1_halberg-fig_7.gif">
Figure 7. Asthma prevalence among Swedish 18-year-old males and the rejection rate at military conscription test
due to asthma in Finland.

<img src="http://www.acnem.org/images/journal/21-1_april_2002/21-1_halberg-fig_8.gif">
Figure 8. General asthma prevalence in the Swedish population.

Another interesting graph is of the statistics for the locations of melanomas & other so called sun-related skin cancers, showing clearly that they occur mostly in locations the least exposed to the sun, while locations the most exposed to sun (head, arms, legs) have the fewest cancers. In other words, sun is protective against skin cancers (induced by radioactive fallouts & possibly EMF).
<img src="http://www.acnem.org/images/journal/21-1_april_2002/21-1_halberg-fig_15.gif">
Fig. 15. The combined distribution of dysplastic naevi and melanoma (‘dots’) over the human body.

Boy this stuff just blows me away...I can't hardly believe that some of this crap is going on....no wonder health conscious people in the know are often labelled paranoid..it is almost out of the realm of fathomable.

Thanks for the info guys....sometimes I wish I were an ostrich.

Sandi
xoxo