AD-HOC

[jbartas]

It turns out cement plants have been linked to many kinds of cancer. Here's an excerpt from an email someone sent in:

Dear John,

I have been trying to read up on some of the health
effects of being so close to a cement factory.
Correlations between cement exposure and gastric
cancer as well as lung and bladder cancer have been
reported. It is not only the cement, but also the kiln
dust of processing.

Literature (a few):

Cancer Causes Control. 2007 Aug;18(6):645-54. Epub
2007 May 23. Occupation and risk of lung cancer in
Central and Eastern Europe: the IARC multi-center
case-control study.Bardin-Mikolajczak A, Lissowska J,
Zaridze D, Szeszenia-Dabrowska N, Rudnai P, Fabianova
E, Mates D, Navratilova M, Bencko V, Janout V, Fevotte
J, Fletcher T, 't Mannetje A, Brennan P, Boffetta P.

Int J Cancer. 2007 May 1;120(9):2013-8. Airborne
exposures and risk of gastric cancer: a prospective
cohort study.Sjödahl K, Jansson C, Bergdahl IA, Adami
J, Boffetta P, Lagergren J.

Mortality and cancer incidence among Lithuanian cement
producing workers Occup. Environ. Med. G Smailyte, J
Kurtinaitis and A Andersen 2004;61;529-534

Problems are only:

1.) One study could find correlation between gastric
cancer or colon cancer and cement, but others not,
instead, however, between lung / bladder and cement.

2.) Most prospective studies were done with workers in
mines, so they had direct contact with cement and
breathed in the dust on a regularly basis. The bias
would be "selected group", which would not be
representative for the public.

3.) Furthermore, most studies were carried out as
retrospective cohort studies, which is most common in
environmental studies (because you cannot exposure
willingly people to toxic substances and see what
happens, right?, so that you have to do that
retrospectively), so that they might be biased also.

That's always the problem with these studies. So,
hardliners of the opposite site, e.g. the company,
will always use the issue of bias in retrospective
studies or in selected groups in prospective studies,
that is why it is so difficult to get substances
acknowledged as toxic for the public. You really have
to be "fit" in studies if you want to use them to stop
something, unfortunately, although it is considerable
to be "common sense".
_________________
Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all.
— John Maynard Keynes