The IARC’s trail of fear and rising costs

WHO agency awarded Rubber Duck for coffee, meat, talcum powder, glyphosate alarms

This month the WHO/International Agency for Research on Cancer marked its 50th anniversary in Lyon, France. Reports from the event held last week indicate IARC’s executives and supporting scientists participated in three days of self- congratulation. Unfortunately, FP Comment was not on hand to present IARC with our Rubber Duck Award for Junk Science.

For all its claims to being the world’s leading source of cancer research, the UN-related agency’s reports on cancer threats have turned into misleading, alarmist and costly guides to hazards and risks that may not exist. Of all agencies in the world, none compares with IARC as a potential source of fear and apprehension in the world population.

Just this week IARC produced research that claimed too- hot coffee ( 70 to 80 degrees Celsius) is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” At the same time, however, the agency announced a reversal of its 1991 claim that coffee itself is “possibly carcinogenic” to humans. Now, 25 years later, IARC says “ooops,” it’s not. Fortunately, few took the coffee warning seriously. But other recent IARC monographs and reports are the source of ongoing political and economic mayhem.

Last month Johnson & Johnson, the health care company, was ordered to pay $55 million to a woman who claims talcum powder she applied to her genital area caused her ovarian cancer. The jury decision was based in part on a 2010 IARC research report that claimed “perineal use of talc- based body powder is possibly carcinogenic to humans.”

The IARC evidence for the link is absurdly limited, and rejected by most scientists. But when Canadian consumers Google “talcum power and cancer” the first promoted link is to Diamond & Diamond, personal injury lawyers who say recent studies “have shown” a risk link between talcum and ovarian cancer. “Please call immediately.” Johnson & Johnson faces total fines of $ 127 million so far in the United States, and in May lawyers launched a Canadian class action suit. IARC science also plays a role in promoting cellphone cancer scares. In 2011 it classified cell radio waves as “possibly carcinogenic to humans.” Last month when the U.S. National Toxicology Program released its dead rat study it claimed its findings “appear to support” IARC’s conclusions ( see our cellphone Duckie elsewhere on this page).

Last October IARC dropped another bomb: Red meat, known to the agency as “mammalian muscle meat,” was found to be “probably carcinogenic to humans based on limited evidence.” Processed meat (bacon, sausages, salami) was said to be “carcinogenic.” Even worse, it’s the same rating IARC gives to smoking cigarettes. “Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes,” said The Guardian.

Critics pounced on the dangerous loopiness of giving equal cancer ratings to bacon and cigarettes. Smoking increases the risk of lung cancer by 2,500 per cent. One oncologist said the risk of colorectal cancer from bacon increases by one percentage point. As The Guardian later wrote, IARC’s comparing of bacon to smoking “is confusing and dangerous.”

Maybe not as dangerous and costly as the potential impact of last year’s IARC report on glyphosate, the Monsanto- developed weed killer. Glyphosate was listed as “probably” carcinogenic to humans based on a scientific assessment that one Canadian scientist says contradicts the conclusions of other research.

Keith Solomon, a toxicologist and professor emeritus at Guelph University, also said IARC based part of its conclusions on an erroneous understanding of research he conducted in Colombia. IARC said Solomon’s research proved that glyphosate produced DNA damage that might lead to cancer. That conclusion, Solomon told the Western Reporter, is “totally wrong.” He added: “There is no evidence that glyphosate is genotoxic.”

On the basis of IARC’s report, however, the European Union may be on the brink of banning one of the world’s great agricultural chemicals. For that alone, IARC deserves this year’s first Rubber Duckie.