“Cure” and “Cancer” seem to appear together in mainstream reports these days only when lowering expectations or hedging bets. Health reports typically indicate either that trials of new treatments have failed or that they may show a narrow zone of promise.

In its heyday, though, the idea that we were "on the verge of the cure" within a generation was seen as an imperative, fueling federal policy and money allocation. It greased government spending on the school system despite families increasingly finding government schools of no advantage to bringing out the best in their children.

Per the motto, "Curiosity creates cures," spending flowed readily into biomedical experimentation. Many grants were legislated, and we were always "only a generation away" from being cancer-free.

Data from Harvard, the National Vital Statistics System, and other sources pour water on the hopes behind pink ribbons. Cancer is increasing at younger ages, and is catching up to heart disease as the number one cause of death.

Public faith in scientific institutions is at a low, coming off their exploitation of emergency rule. Cancer remains since 1933 one of the two leading causes of death in the U.S.A., and this country is one of the five highest in the world in cancer incidence. Americans’ lifespans fell last year to 1990s levels. Even the Biden White House was forced to call its own 2022 funding for cancer biomedical research a “moonshot.”

The approaches via which the system has been searching for “a cure” are proving ruinous to science's reputation.

A generational goal that would slice away many root causes of cancer, and in the process decentralize financial power while stabilizing the “unexplained” crash in mental health, would be an initiative addressing economic policies that thrust carcinogens upon Americans.

According to the government’s own “Report on Carcinogens,” of the eight cited carcinogens recently discovered:

• Six are by-products from human water disinfection systems called haloacetic acids (HAAs).
• One is mixed into common textiles and plastics used in clothing, furniture, and carpets, antimony trioxide.
• One is from a bacteria with proven links to the gut biome, diet, and ulcers.

Efforts to impact cancer-causing agents, then, should focus on the quality, or lack thereof, of our water, clothing, and food. Citizens never requested that water management districts introduce carcinogens, nor did they ask for antimony trioxide to be added to offshored mass-produced clothing priced to move.

Water districts espouse the six HAAs they leave in the drinking water as part of “safety” and "purification." At the same time, in much of America the private capture and storage of the rainwater for local usage and economic activity is restricted. As a result, entire communities, cities and counties become dependent on water districts, trapping people effectively into consuming the six carcinogens.

Legalizing rainwater harvesting would free people and enterprises to acquire basics of life such as water privately. That liberty, in turn, would reduce the mass consumption of HAAs that cause cancer.

The next of the eight is antimony trioxide, a component in novel textiles used in clothing and household furniture. Wool, linens, cotton, leather, fur, wood, and bamboo do not contain this hazard. People wore clothes of the latter types for most of history for durability and for heaviness when seeking warmth. Policies encouraging offshoring of production, however, have enabled spandexes and other predominantly imported materials that are lightweight, made for international freight, and water-repelling, to become comparatively more affordable. These factors economically pressure the population away from their original preferences for hardier and, it turns out, healthier materials. Governments, in this way, incentivize, if not push, cancer-causing antimony trioxide molecules into our clothing, homes, and bodies through the cost impacts of globalizing the economy.

Despite opposition from unwilling officials, redirecting economic policy towards producing durable clothing and home goods in America would pivot margins towards domestic makers. This would bring benefits to Americans, who could purchase reasonably priced, non-carcinogenic chairs, couches, flooring, pants, shirts, jackets, blouses, dresses, uniforms, and more made for them by other Americans. We are as capable as our ancestors of making garments, cushions, and more without adding antimony trioxide, and could manufacture them more efficiently. Many workers would prefer the self-determination of directly making things for their fellow nationals, over staffing bureaucracies that coordinate and regulate distant imports and exports. Furthermore, research indicates satisfaction at the job supports psychological fulfillment, which itself is seen by experts as cancer-reducing. Conspicuously, senators Chris Murphy and Tim Ryan ignore meaningful work that qualitatively brings benefits into the hands of one’s community, in their vacant prescription to “cure America’s spiritual crisis.”

The eighth of the list is helicobacter pylori, the widespread bacterium that, for some, causes serious sickness. H. Pylori thrives where intestinal flora have been disturbed, and has indicated that foods healthful for digestive microorganisms are able to help keep H. Pylori in balance. Therefore, an attainable national strategy for reduction of cancers related to H. Pylori would appear to be increasing dietary intake of quality fermented foods.

If government would cease using taxpayer funds to promote international imports at the expense of domestic business owners, then stateside fresh picklers would likely meet more of the demand for fermented foods and wrest market share from mass-produced imports. Thus, increasing the bioactive fermented dishes that Americans find appealing would help ameliorate the deadly tumors that afflict us from carcinogenic H. Pylori.

Basing an economy on disposable, cheap, imported products is like waiting for a medical answer to cancer. Both rest in glaring illusions, cast as normality, while lives continue to be devastated by disease and poverty. "Your generation will develop the cure for cancer in a lab" merely kicks major economic policy cans of our time down the road.

Develop a cure? The best advice is to make policies and enterprises that develop our domestic goods economy in the free hands of the people.

Image: National Vital Statistics System