As the events marking National Breast Cancer Awareness Month begin this week, a new book by a University of Pittsburgh researcher has been garnering national attention with charges that America's efforts to prevent cancer have been largely ignored for political and commercial reasons.

Medical science has down-played prevention in favor of a massive campaign to cure the disease, Devra Davis, director of Pitt's Center for Environmental Oncology, says in her book, "The Secret History of the War on Cancer" (Basic Books, $27.95).

In the book, which goes on sale next week, Dr. Davis alleges:

Her appointment to a multimillion-dollar breast cancer research program in the Clinton administration was sidetracked by the chemical industry that opposed her efforts to identify environment sources of the disease.

A reluctant medical profession blocked the widespread use of the Pap smear to detect cancer of the cervix for a decade because it resisted the use of laboratory technicians, rather than physicians, to read test results.

Links between tobacco, X-rays, sunlight, hormones and such widespread chemicals as benzene were recognized by scientists in 1936, with little if any precautions taken over subsequent decades.

The United States has tripled the purchase of products containing asbestos, a known carcinogen, from Mexico since 2000, while much of the world including the European Union, has banned the use of the substance.

Both the American Cancer Society and American Medical Association were allied with the tobacco industry for years, even after the U.S. surgeon general's 1964 report linking smoking and lung cancer.

Pennsylvania continues to feel the effects of this former partnership, Dr. Davis explains, in its law restricting municipalities from limiting smoking in restaurants and bars. That is the law that stalled Allegheny County's efforts this year to ban smoking.

She also notes that Eugene Knopf, a lobbyist for the American Cancer Society's state chapter, quit in 1993 to work for the American Tobacco Institute after, she alleges, he manipulated the chapter into supporting a law that effectively blocked local control of smoking.

Dr. Davis yesterday discussed her book on National Public Radio, and next week, Newsweek magazine plans to feature it as its "book of the week."

Much of her information is drawn from a long-ignored report to the National Cancer Institute during the Carter administration that she unearthed in her research.

Based on interviews with 80 key figures from the history of cancer research, the study "showed that the revolving door of industrial and government cancer experts had operated since the earliest efforts to deal with cancer nationwide," Dr. Davis said.

Sources of cancer were identified in both the home and workplace by these figures starting in the 1930s, but the proof that "how we live and work affects the chances we may get cancer was basically ignored" by the federally funded "war on cancer" launched by President Richard Nixon in 1971.

At the same time that war was under way, the U.S. government was funding research on a "safe cigarette," Dr. Davis said.

The federal government spent $40 million from 1968 to 1979 through an agency dubbed the Less Hazardous Cigarette Working Group that oversaw the development of 100 experimental products. Although filters were believed to be the most-effective way to reduce tar and nicotine from tobacco, they caused people to smoke more cigarettes in order to maintain their nicotine levels, Dr. Davis shows.

She also points out that the filter of one of the first popular "safe cigarettes," Kent, actually contained asbestos. Nearly 600 million packs of Kent were sold before it was changed in 1956.

A native of Donora, Dr. Davis used the 1948 incident in that former industrial town in which 20 people died during a temperature inversion, as the starting point for her 2002 book, "When Smoke Ran Like Water," a history of air pollution. It was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Dr. Davis, 60, has held public positions in the Carter and Clinton administrations, advised the World Health Organization and also is a professor of epidemiology in Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health. First published on October 5, 2007 at 12:00 am Post-Gazette Book Editor Bob Hoover can be reached at bhoover@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1634.