It's true!  Even though we as a society think of cancer as something to be diagnosed and treated (at the expense of the patient and the patient's health insurance company).  Ordinarily we only make people clean up the mess if they are the ones who spilled it in the first place, if you follow me.  

If I came over to your house and spilled a pint of salsa on your kitchen floor, you might expect me to clean it up.  You might be angry at me for having spilled it in the first place.  If I shrugged my shoulders, claimed it was the cost of doing business, and left the house, you would probably never invite me over again.

But in this metaphor, not only am I the one coming over to your house and spilling the salsa, but you don't even seem to realize that's what happened.  Tests are performed; salsa is detected.  You and your family buckle down and do whatever it takes to clean the kitchen floor.  

If you try and complain that you're not the one who spilled the salsa, the mainstream media will pretty much ignore you.  People understand abstract terms like "carcinogens" and "blood levels," but only in the vaguest sense.

The truth, as New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof points out, is that we aren't to blame for the salsa on our kitchen floors.  It's big corporations dumping that salsa, and refusing to take any responsibility for it.  They refuse to be held responsible either for dumping the carcinogens in the first place, or for footing the bill for the cancer that results.  

With very few exceptions (lung cancer in smokers, and cervical cancer arising from an HPV infection both come to mind), cancers are environmental.  They are caused by exposure to the chemicals that bathe us every day.  They saturate the soils, seep into our ground water, float around in our air, bubble in our drinking water.  We cannot escape the presence of dioxins, PCBs, heavy metals - they are ubiquitous.

Barbara Ehrenreich covers this in her essay "Welcome to Cancerland."  We think of cancer as a mysterious visitor, but it is not so mysterious.  

The President's Cancer Panel is about to release a paper on this topic.  Having researched the causes of cancer in America, the panel is going to announce that in Kristof's words, "our lackadaisical approach to regulation may have far-reaching consequences for our health. […] "Only a few hundred of the more than 80,000 chemicals in use in the United States have been tested for safety," the report says. It adds: "Many known or suspected carcinogens are completely unregulated."

We as a nation are committed to the idea of the individual.  We believe that each individual's choices shape that individual, and that each person is responsible for their own fate.  But this is clearly not always the case.  No one plays "blame the victim" when a plane crashes and passengers die because of the airline's oversight.  No one blames the Gulf of Mexico for BP's oil leak.  

And yet, we let individuals shoulder the burden of cancer.  A lot of individuals; Kristof points out that 41% of Americans "will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives."

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user meltedplastic