President's Cancer Panel: Cut Risks

The President's Cancer Panel calls for U.S. leaders to "summon the political will" to reduce Americans' cancer risks — and slams the tobacco, food, and beverage industries as "disease vectors."

Appointed by the President Bush, the panel's three members are cancer survivor and cycling champion Lance Armstrong; Margaret L. Kripke, Ph.D., chief academic officer at Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center; and panel chairman LaSalle D. Leffall Jr., M.D., professor of surgery at Howard University in Washington.

It's the panel's job to tell the president how the nation's war on cancer is going. According to this year's report, it's not going very well at all.

Research continues to move forward — but thwarting major progress is the unhealthy lifestyles of millions of Americans.

Individual responsibility is important, the panel notes. But the panel finds that cancer prevention efforts "are compromised by federal, state, and local policies that have decreased the availability and affordability of healthy foods, limited physical education in schools," and created an "environment that discourages physical activity."

Perhaps even more importantly, the panel says, are "ineffective policies" that fail to regulate the marketing practices of "disease vectors" — the tobacco, food, and beverage industries.

Mincing no words, the panel report singles out the tobacco industry as "a vector of disease and death that can no more be ignored in seeking solutions to the tobacco problem than mosquitoes can be ignored in seeking to eradicate malaria."

Among the panel's recommendations: