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- Pharmaceutical Company Ties
"The
NCI has become what amounts to a government pharmaceutical company."
-Samuel Broder, NCI director from 1989 to 1995
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Both the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the American Cancer
Society (ACS) supported the drug company, AstraZeneca
to profit from the drug Tamoxifen [Tamoxifen.doc]. AstraZeneca
(formerly known as Zeneca before it merged with the Swedish
pharmaceutical company Astra) was owned by Imperial Chemical
Industries, a leading international manufacturer of industrial
chemicals and carcinogenic pesticides. Teaming up with
taxpayer-supported
NCI and “charitable” ACS was a masterful
public relations coup for AstraZeneca, providing the
company with
valuable, albeit undeserved, goodwill from millions of
American women.
AstraZeneca profits from treating breast cancer,
and hopes to profit still more from the prospects of large-scale
national
use of Tamoxifen for breast cancer "prevention." The
NCI and the ACS both embraced AstraZeneca's new drug, aggressively
launching a "chemoprevention" program in 1992 aimed
at recruiting 16,000 healthy women at "high risk" of
breast cancer. The five-year clinical trial claimed that Tamoxifen
reduced breast cancer risks by 30 percent. The risks of this
toxic drug, including potentially fatal uterine cancer and
blood clots, were noted but trivialized. As the trials progressed,
it became clear that the risk of serious complications outweighed
professed benefits. Women have still not been informed about
delayed risks of liver cancer. Equally troubling, neither the
ACS nor the NCI has pursued evidence that regular use of a
cheap, nonpatented, over-the-counter drug—aspirin—has
been shown to reduce risks of breast cancer. (A 1996 study
found that women who took aspirin three times a week for
five years reduced their risk by up to 30 percent, a finding
worth
pursuing.)
For years the ACS demonstrated its allegiance
to the multibillion-dollar cancer drug industry by aggressively
attacking potential
competitors through its "Committee on Unproven Methods of Cancer Management," created
to "review" unorthodox or alternative therapies.
This committee, staffed by "volunteer health care professionals," invariably
promoted mainstream, expensive, and arguably toxic drugs patented
by major pharmaceutical companies, and opposed alternative
or "unproven" therapies, which are generally cheap,
non-patentable, and minimally toxic. As with Senator Joseph
McCarthy's blacklist of suspected communists, once a clinician
or oncologist was associated with "unproven methods," harassment
and blackballing often followed, and funding would dry
up. This witch hunt against alternative practitioners was
in striking
contrast to the Society's uncritical endorsement of conventional
toxic chemotherapy, despite increasing concern that chemotherapy
may not significantly improve survival rates for most cancers.
After an extensive review of clinical oncology studies,
for example, Dr. Ulrich Abel of the Institute of Epidemiology
and
Biometry at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, concluded
that for most patients chemotherapy functions as little
more than a placebo, with an attendant decline in quality
of life
from the toxic treatment. Excerpted from “
The
High Stakes of Cancer Prevention” by Samuel Epstein
and Liza Gross, Tikkun Magazine, Nov/Dec 2000 www.tikkun.org
More…
Drug Industry “Rally” to receive NCI Funding
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