Detroit and Cancer Surveillance

 

So I'm working on a post about the most beautiful skylines in America. 😊

The impetus for this forthcoming post was my commenting on the unfortunate landscape of the unfortunate City of Detroit in my post, yesterday - how even before its collapse, it wasn't a "pretty" city, and I was speculating the reasons for that. While writing it, I was reminding of something I learned recently in my cancer registry program at school - something that gets overlooked in discussions about the downfall of Detroit, so I decided to make it its own post first.

Don't get me wrong, I actually love visiting Detroit -  there's a lot to do, great music, great food, great cultural mix, and I've found the people of all cultural backgrounds to be friendly. 

It is just very clear that Detroit was focused on auto-industry and functionality, and nothing else, almost from the beginning. They put all their eggs in one basket of industry, thinking it would never end, rather than cultivating other industry or even investing in its own infrastructure (in a sustainable way) to promote tourism, as other cities have.

Even more importantly,  not enough investment in protecting itself from toxic pollution. And we can get into both corporate and union corruption, as well as government-leadership corruption on both political sides, but let's not get bogged down in that debate, because that's not the point of this post.

Except that I will only add that Detroit is proof that the Republican theory of "trickle-down economics" is BS.

It can be better at a local level than nationally, but the reason "trickle-down economics" never fully works is because this theory  completely negates the element of human greed, from either business  OR government - and sometimes even in the organizations designed to protect the laborers or consumer from this greed  - which famously happened with Detroit's Jimmy Hoffa, who skimming off the top of auto employee unions and being involved with organized crime).

Detroit is a cautionary tale for many reasons, but perhaps the most overlooked one is what happens when we do not have enough federal or state environmental protection laws in place (or roll back environmental protection, as has happened under Trump).  regarding that toxic environmental output - there's a reason why 1 of the 2 federal cancer surveillance programs in the United States, SEER (Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results) for the NCI (National Cancer Institute) began at its inception in 1973 by choosing Detroit (and Oakland, CA) as one of only 2 cities rather than states to study as a hotspot for cancer in America - not the state of Michigan overall, just metro Detroit.

In fact, even before that, in 1949, private organizations such as the American Cancer Society and the Women's Field Army funded a cancer registry/cancer surveillance program just for the metro area of Detroit because it was a known hotspot by then, called the Metropolitan Detroit Cancer Surveillance System (MDCSS) which still exists today, now federally funded by SEER/NCI.

Though cancer data today is aggregated, studied, and presented on a state level by either SEER (NCI) or NPCR (CDC) or both, subdivided by counties rather than cities for epidemiology -  the Metropolitan Detroit Cancer Surveillance System (MDCS) still exists and is still funded because it's still a hotspot for cancer. 

(For the record, though - my state of Kentucky is the #1 for cancer in America, attributed to coal mining, tobacco/smoking, and lack of statutory environmental protection laws.)

Now - in trying to prove environmental toxicity, we Democrats have focused on climate science to prove environmental damage, and I understand why, because it's become dire.

The corporations responsible for it found a way to deny it and push the denial via lining the pockets of our politicians (mostly Republican politicians).

Thus, IMO, we should focus on cancer statistics instead - because we have the proof in our hands for decades that communities with the highest  numbers of cancer also have the highest known environmental carcinogens - and it's growing.

Though the statistics for surviving cancer are better than they've ever been, cancer incidence has increased - and actually, the fact that people are living longer has not helped cancer incidence, only contributed to this increase.

Also, we like to think we're so advanced here in the U.S. compared to other countries, but according to the IACR (International Association of Cancer Registrars), the United States is still in the Top 5 countries in the world for cancer incidence in the world. 

(I used the IACR for these statistics, because our federal stats go to WHO, which people have politicized - the IACR is the international organization for my goal profession, cancer registrar. Yes, WHO funds it, just as the U.S. government funds American research, but I can assure you that nobody at the hospital level sending these statistics upwards to that level is thinking about how they can twist these statistics politically, they're just abstracting cancer reports with the type, stage, geographic location, and demographics of each cancer patient and sending them to the state, then to the federal funding agencies.)

Both political sides have acknowledged that cancer exists, that there are environmental factors for it,  and that we need to understand it  better to stop it, and thus have agreed to vast amounts of federal funding for cancer surveillance and research - so these are not statistics that can be denied or argued with, at this point, we're way beyond that. 

You can try to hide the statistics, which corporations did effectively many times for many years -  most notably by tobacco companies regarding both the toxicity of their tobacco mix AND the extreme addictive potential - but eventually, due to so much cancer surveillance funding, science won beginning in the 90s - and it could no longer be denied and tobacco companies began losing lawsuits.

You can also line the pockets of politicians to push cutting funding for the research  - which has happened under the current administration - not directly, but indirectly by cutting funding to the CDC and the FDA and other federal government institutions that fund cancer research) - but you can no longer flat out deny environmental causes for cancer and get your voters to deny it.

Most people don't care about things that don't directly affect them, currently or in the past.

Thus, IMO, the smarter thing for my fellow Democrats to do  in order to prove environmental damage would be to focus on the existing scientific evidence regarding cancer incidence, rather than climate-change science - because we have ALL all been affected by cancer, and nobody denies environmental factors for it anymore. 

Regardless, I'm still rooting for Detroit to make a comeback someday, bigger and better than it was before -  it's just going to take some time, right?

Now, onto brighter topics - the best U.S. skylines in America, in no particular order. 😊