The President’s Cancer Panel, created by Congress in 1971 and mandated to report to the president once a year, has come out with its latest findings on the state of cancer in the U.S.: environmental factors are playing a bigger role in cancer than we thought.  Why?  Chemicals, for one thing.  The report highlighted bisphenolA, the chemical used in plastic bottles and can liners, and now banned in the city of Chicago.   But it also spotlighted formaldehyde and benzene.

We’re exposed to these chemicals in the food we eat, the products we use, in the air we breathe, at work and at home, the report’s authors say.  And it’s time to require more regulations of some of the more dangerous chemicals on the market – chemicals whose makers might not always be forthcoming about.

But we’re also exposed to radiation – any time you have an x-ray, or a CT scan.  The report found that in 2007, patients received 69 million CT scans; that’s up from 18 million in 1993.  And apparently, the radiation a body receives from one chest CT scan is the same that Hiroshima survivors took from being less than half a mile away from the blast. Yikes.  The panelists are urging doctors to be more judicious with these scans, especially on children.

For the past few years, they wrote, it’s been thought that about 4% of cancers were environmentally related.  But they say that’s “woefully out of date.”

You can read it here (this is a .pdf file).