Required reading for prime ministers, presidents and multinational chief executives

This issue of the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine carries two substantial review papers: John Newby and Vyvyan Howard’s ‘Environmental influences in cancer aetiology’ and Jeremy Thompson and Honor Anthony’s ‘The health effects of waste incinerators’. Having just read these two outstanding reviews and wondering what an editorial might add to their devastating message, I noticed the Sun’s front page, which read ‘NOBODY WINS BB’, referring to a reality television show. That the Sun’s readership exceeds that of combined broadsheets, yet inflates trivia into national importance, while ignoring literal life-and-death issues as addressed here, is depressing. These reviews should be compulsory reading for Mr Blair and his Cabinet, and for every chief executive of multinational corporations who since 1945 have inadvertently exposed our children to over 85,000 new chemicals, the majority of which are not tested for their impact on human health. The authors show that environmental degradation is no longer just a hazard for the third world or just associated with poverty, but now affects everybody in the developed world, including children of prime ministers, presidents and multinational chief executives. Newby and Howard offer a definitive review of the environmental aetiology of cancer, and complementary to this Thompson and Anthony explore the health effects of incinerators. Both reviews make chilling reading and the Editor should be congratulated for being bold enough to publish both reviews in full, instead of the usual single research papers, which miss the ‘bigger picture’, something these authors grasp by crossing disciplines and specialities.