She’s busy busy busy these days, a juggler tossing multiple plates in the air. Cool, collected, completely in control, she handles a reporter’s interview, takes a telephone taping, prepares a talk for that night, fishes out her flashdrive, prints talking points from a PowerPoint, packs and unpacks bags, fields a call from her husband just in from Paris and needs to be picked up, directs two assistants, drinks green tea -- all with complete aplomb. All in a tiny
University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute office crammed with cancer books, her own, of course, and a collection that runs the gamut from The Nazi War on Cancer to Synthetic Planet, The Cancer Industry to The Cigarette Century, with innumerable stops in between.
“My life is a bit out of control right now,” she smiles wanly. “I’m multi-tasking even more than I otherwise do.”
Well, she’s a hot number these days, with a hot new book on a hot topic.
She’s Devra Lee Davis, Ph.D., M.P.H., cancer Cassandra, ecological epidemiologist, world specialist on patterns of cancer in space and time.
Director of
Pitt’s Center for Environmental Oncology, Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Pitt’s Graduate School of Public Health, veteran of the Carter and Clinton administrations, and the
World Health Organization, she’s just weighed in with another blockbuster to follow her 2002 National Book Award finalist.
When
Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution is nothing less than a brilliantly researched, deftly written, emotionally wringing, and highly personal account of the 1948 Donora air inversion, the carcinogen-filled killer smog which killed 20 people outright, 50 a month later, and took thousands within a decade. As Davis poignantly points out, Donora was her hometown, and the mill smoke incited cancer cells in thousands more, including her own parents.
Part personal memoir, part science primer, part j’accuse, her books elevates Donora, and its disaster, to paradigm, to myth.
Not stopping there, she includes the infamous 1952 London smog which similarly killed thousands, leaded gasoline that caused brain damage in smog-ridden Southern California, and a myriad of chilling tales of environmental and workplace poisons causing breast cancer, male sterility, heart disease, and a host of other ills.
The Case for PreventionNow her new book,
The Secret History of the War on Cancer, which Newsweek picked as a book of the week, tells the scrupulously
documented story of big money and lost opportunities, of misdirection and malfeasance, of millions dying in modernity’s worst ongoing plague. “Cancer’s a metaphor,” Davis allows, “but it’s also a brute.”
Since 1971, she points out, and $40 billion after the official launch of America’s war on cancer, we continue to be focused on finding and curing the illness, not on controlling what causes it, not on taking the necessary steps that would significantly reduce or eliminate workplace or environmental cancer – what Davis estimates are more than 10 million preventable cancer deaths over the past 30 years.
Cigarettes, of course, top her list; but there’s also benzene, which since the 1930s has been identified as a carcinogen; vinyl chloride, known to cause liver cancer; and so on. But all too often without directly linked deaths nothing gets done.
“When it comes to environmental health,” she says, “we are expected to wait until after the fact – until there are dead bodies or ill people – before taking action. But we can do a better job of prevention. We have to. Because we’re fighting the wrong war with the wrong weapons against the wrong enemies.
“We have to pay attention to the causes of cancer,” Davis adds. “We have to reduce the use of known and suspected toxic materials” – here, there, everywhere. “Because toxic materials circulate globally, we can’t be islands. We can’t ban chemicals in one country and ship them to another. Pollutants don’t need passports.
“There are polar bears,” she adds, “who have so many pollutants in their fat that they should buried in hazardous waste sites.”
Living a Healthier LifeSo the message: “we have to do a better job of cleaning up the world in which we live and work. We need to stop using things that are suspicious.” Forget proven, she says. Suspicious. “We have to get smarter about predicting what things will cause cancer.”
On a micro level, Davis advocates eating natural and local foods that battle cancer – garlic, for example, broccoli, and fish oil. Cleaning with
natural abrasives, baking soda, vinegar and water. Exfoliating skin with oatmeal. Using carcinogen-free make-up. And so on.
On a macro level, she says, “we have to encourage the green revolution” -- specifying green products in new construction and retrofits, for example, seeking
LEED certification, and so on.
Nowhere more than here. Returning to Pittsburgh in 1999 to care for her dying mother, the Shadyside resident says that “Pittsburgh is an anchor for me. It’s where I come from. It’s most important to me. And with all the outdoor activities available – trails, kayaking, biking – it’s a fun place for people who like to be outdoors.”
Davis is also proud of what the city’s become. “We’re making real progress here,” she says. Given the intimacy of the city, she says, and the power of the universities and
UPMC, “things are possible in Pittsburgh that you can’t make happen in Manhattan. As a small city with some very large institutions we can afford to take risks – and have an effect.”
Nevertheless, with the National Cancer Institute claiming that two-thirds of all cancers have environmental causes, and more than 200 known carcinogens seeping into our lives, homes, and workplaces – and with extensive auto emissions, largely unregulated river barge traffic, and the assorted ills of urban life -- “we’ve got work to do,” she says.
“The world is changing,” Davis adds. “We may not be as good as we need to be. But we’re not as bad as we used to be.” She smiles. “If ‘hell with the lid off’ can clean up its act,” she says, referring to James Parton’s famous 19th-century description of mill-choked Pittsburgh, “there’s hope.”
Abby Mendelson’s latest book, Ghost Dancer, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.
Captions:
Devra Davis in her Office
Secret History of the War on Cancer
At UPMC: Flower Photograph by Maryann Donovan
On the UPMC Shadyside campus
All photographs copyright Brian Cohen