WELL WELL WELL - Common sense cure

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Rates of melanoma (the deadliest of skin cancers) have gone up by 50 per cent since 1980, and the American Cancer Society estimates over 62 000 new cases in the US this year. The solution, we’re told, is to apply sunscreen more often—even though we’ve gone sunscreen-crazy since the ‘80s, and even though the safety of some key ingredients (oxybenzone) has been called into question over its ability to cause the very free-radical damage sunscreens are supposed to prevent.

It leaves me wondering what happened to common sense, to enjoying the sun long enough to get the desperately-needed benefits of vitamin D but not long enough to damage our skin. I’m thinking the problem isn’t so much a little sun as it is the false sense of security the comes with our self-basting in chemicals—a pseudo-safety that makes us reckless about exposure, keeps chemical companies quite happy and does nothing to curb melanoma rates.

We’re so vain. And so easily fooled, most easily by those who wear the mantle of convention. Which leads me again to the pro-Bill C-51 campaigns now being organized by skeptics groups who believe we do in fact need tighter regulation of natural health products—and who, ironically, also believe that the bill won’t unduly restrict natural health products, as they’ll continue to be regulated by the Natural Health Products Directorate, a directorate that has already resulted in thousands of perfectly safe products disappearing from the market.

The truth is that there is an industry informing those writing and supporting bills like C-51 (and behind those delivering sun-safety messages), an industry that does not have our safety as a top priority. Shane Ellison—who, as a former Eli Lilly employee, should know—says, “As a scientist, I witnessed first-hand the priorities of international pharmaceutical companies ... [they] ranked wealth first and health a distant second.”

I tried to find out just how big the drug lobby is in Canada, but Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch told me that neither our provincial governments nor our federal government require disclosure of dollar figures. US numbers probably give us a pretty good idea of the magnitude of its influence though—they spent $189 million on lobbying Washington last year, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

We all know that industry will go to great lengths to protect its interests, and the drug industry is no different than any other—it wants to land on its feet, and likely will, as it has in Australia, whose natural health products industry has been pummeled and stripped and is now, since the passing of a bill similar to C-51, a mere ghost of its former self.

Having followed medical politics for many years, Helke Ferrie, in an open letter to Stephen Harper, argues a number of reasons C-51 should be scrapped, one of them being that the existing Food and Drugs Act actually already has a clear concept of safety in its regulations (the ones that permitted Dr Shiv Chopra and his colleagues to bring forward the science identifying bovine growth hormone as dangerous before they were fired for insubordination.)

I want to trust agencies whose apparent purpose it is to look out for our safety, but in light of facts like these, and Stephen Harper being awarded the Code of Silence Award by the Canadian Association of Journalists last year for his silencing of scientists and rejection of freedom-of-information inquiries, trust can be a little hard to come by.

We don’t need aggressive fine-tooth-comb protection from products that pose a risk lower than that posed by our food chain any more than we need more chemicals on our skin. We just need some shade, a little common sense and a lot of skepticism of the wealthiest and most powerful voices among us. V

WELL WELL WELL - Common sense cure

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