Official: Stop 'industrial manslaughter'

NEW YORK, Sept. 18 (UPI) -- Decades have been wasted examining the problem of carcinogens while not doing enough to stem "industrial manslaughter," a U.S. researcher said.

Jeanne Mager Stellman, chairwoman of environmental and occupational health sciences at State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, told the President's Cancer Panel that government policy and a "lack of the will to prevent occupational disease, death and disability" are responsible for the failure to control cancer-causing chemicals in the workplace.

"While we as a society have been debating and delaying and have been occupying ourselves with setting up straw man arguments about incidence and attributable risk, more and more chemicals have been introduced into commerce and have remained largely unmonitored and unregulated," Stellman said in a statement.

Stellman attributed the successful campaign to remove the threat of asbestos more to health advocates rather than to government action. PCBs, while widely considered hazardous, are still a major threat to workers because few have championed efforts to control them and the government has not followed its own mandates to protect the public, Stellman said.