ONE IN THREE by ADAM WISHART

David Lodge

David Lodge, the author of Small World, Changing Places and Nice Work, says this about my book.

"One in Three shines like a good deed in a world full of unnecessary books. No disease exerts such universal dread as cancer, and yet few of us really understand its nature. By interweaving a moving, but unsentimental, account of his father’s last illness and death with a lucid history of cancer and the efforts of medical science to find a cure for it, Adam Wishart has produced a book that is informative, balanced, accessible, and absolutely riveting."

How good is that?

Clare Rayner

Claire Rayner, long time agony aunt, one-time cancer patients and President of the Patients Association has lovely things to say about my book.

“This book is a remarkable meld of medical history, scientific fact, and the human experience of cancer, once – and to an extent still – the most feared of diseases. Adam Wishart follows his father’s experience of cancer, as well as his own as a son, in the most enthralling manner possible. I couldn’t commend it more highly.”

How good is that?

Half of All Cancers are Preventable

This is interesting. The American Cancer Society says that so many cancers are preventable. Never mind the advances in treatments (or the scares about pesticides) - if only we followed a few simple things.

At least half of all cancer deaths could be avoided if we only did what we know works to prevent the disease. That's the conclusion of the 2006 edition of Cancer Prevention and Early Detection Facts & Figures, a yearly American Cancer Society report.

Cutting out tobacco, making use of cancer screening tests, reducing levels of obesity and overweight, and improving nutrition and physical activity could go a long way to lowering the number of cancer deaths in the United States, the report says.

Link.

Attack

So after I attacked Vyvyan Howard, he has responded.

He has written a letter in the Guardian.

Adam Wishart's attack on us (Response, March 30) over environmental influences in cancer is political rather than scientific, in that he does not address any specific scientific issue we raised. Wishart is a graduate in politics and philosophy, so maybe it is not surprising that he doesn't wish to engage on the latest science concerning cell signalling disruption by xenochemicals.

The part of the letter that I find most interesting is

We wrote our paper as a scientific article. It underwent peer review and was published in a respected academic journal. It is doubtful that Mr Wishart's book will undergo such rigorous scrutiny.

Its interesting, parts of my book have been reviewed by more than a dozen senior scientists. Karol Sikora one of the most senior cancer scientists in the UK, and an advisor to the WHO, read it and said that it was accurate.

And yet Howard's article was written in the Journal of Nutritional and Environmental Health. Its a journal that does not even win a place in Pubmed. According to this website it seems that the journal hasn't published for a year. Howard's article was published online - and not as part of the normal publishing process.

Moreover, the journal is doubtless respected but within a quite small group of scientists. The editorial board includes many members of the alternative health community. And its most senior editor is Damien Downing who runs a company promoting nutritional responses to health.

I'm not saying that my book should be given more credence. I'm only saying that Howard is making a political as well as a scientific point. He should at least acknoweldge that.