Reference no: EM133304091

Question: How do legal standards of healthcare come into play with the ethical issue of the scientists who back genetics and lifestyle being the main cause of cancer being reliant on large industries in the following case study?

Assignment: Early in the pages of Silent Spring (1962), her classic book publicizing health effects of the use of chemical pesticides, Rachel Carson claimed that Americans ought to revise the US Bill of Rights. She pointed out that, when America was founded, Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues thought that the greatest threats to the "liberty, equality, and fraternity"-preached by the French and embraced in the colonies-were kings and unjust political institutions. Therefore Carson says they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights so as to protect people against government incursions on personal liberty, health, and equality. If our founding mothers and fathers were alive today, however, Carson says that they would take care to rewrite the Bill of Rights so that citizens are protected against industrial pollutants, like chemical pesticides. She argues that powerful corporations (and corporations are defined as "persons" under the US Constitution) constitute a grave threat to public health, public liberty, and public equality, and perhaps a graver threat than that of unjust government. Carson encourages public-health advocates to ask how there can be rights to liberty when dirty technologies take away the liberty to breathe clean air. Or how there can be rights to life, when hazardous wastes pollute the water that is necessary to life. Not everyone would agree with Carson's analysis of the threats to environmental health today. In the case of cancer, for example, the scientific community and the ethical community are divided on the causes of the diseases and on the appropriate ethical response to it. As already mentioned, according to the US National Research Council (1993), cancer will soon become the leading cause of death of Americans. Moreover cancer is not a disease of old age, as cancer victims die, on average, 15 years earlier than others. It is the leading cause of death of children between the ages of 2 and 18, and the leading cause of death of women in their thirties. In fact, since 1950, the cancer rate for children under age 15 has increased by 32 percent. Cancer incidence, in the general population, is increasing six times faster than overall cancer mortality is decreasing (NIH 2000). Because cancer is one of the major environmental-health problems, it is important to identify its causes and to prevent them. The environmental and medical communities tend to agree with Samuel Epstein (1998), that industrial pollutants are the major problem, while the governmental and industrial communities tend to agree with Bruce Ames that genetics and lifestyle are the main causes of cancer.