Day 269 - 25 Jun 96 - Page 35
1 before publication?
2
3 MR. RAMPTON: A review, my Lord.
4
5 MR. JUSTICE BELL: But you did not mean "present" in that way?
6 A. I did not mean that. I mean he presented it to the
7 court or handed it to the court.
8
9 MR. RAMPTON: And it was a recent paper in the New England
10 Journal of Medicine by Hunter and others, one of whom was
11 Professor Willett?
12 A. Yes.
13
14 Q. And there were substantial cohort studies. One was the
15 American Nurses study with 9,000 people with an eight year
16 review?
17 A. Yes.
18
19 Q. And they produced no positive association between dietary
20 fat and breast cancer?
21 A. That is perfectly correct. I think it does need
22 qualifying, as I have qualified in it my statement, that I
23 mean not sure that we really have, as I said earlier,
24 advanced in cancer as far as the people in cardiovascular
25 disease advanced, and I think these kind of studies are
26 still in their infancy. The point I would make about this
27 is that actually virtually, although there have been many
28 studies on long-term follow-ups, they suffer, particularly
29 in cancer, from the problem of when is the initial insult
30 that generates the cancer happening?
31
32 And if you talk to the cancer research people or the
33 imperial cancer research fund, they will say that cancer of
34 the breast may require up to 30 years of cell doubling time
35 before you can feel a palpable tumour. So what one is
36 looking at is a time when the cancer is actually being
37 promoted could have been many years before the studies were
38 done.
39
40 So I do not, in my own opinion, give these studies the same
41 kind of credit - and this is the opposite view to which Dr.
42 Arnott expressed - I personally do not give these studies
43 the same kind of opinion as I do the epidemiological
44 studies which have consistently, in relation to a variety
45 of major diseases of importance, led to causative factors
46 which have in some cases led to the elimination,
47 particularly in the aniline dye industry, as I mentioned in
48 my evidence in-chief, to the elimination of both risk and
49 cancer itself.
50
51 MR. JUSTICE BELL: When you say the epidemiological studies, you
52 mean the population studies?
53 A. The population-based studies, yes.
54
55 MR. RAMPTON: Professor Crawford you say right at the end of
56 this present statement of yours that cancer research is
57 about at the place that cardiovascular research was at in
58 1953?
59 A. Yes. I think that is rather an extreme view. I,
60 perhaps, would like to qualify that. Some of my cancer
