Medical Nemesis by Ivan Illich is required reading on any discussion of the Medical Profession and the Legal Drug Industry and predicted the onset of such development-induced global pandemics as Cancer which appeared in the industrialised western world in the latter part of the last century.

Back in 1940 only 1 in 20 American women got breast cancer but now it's 1 in 8. Cancer is a disease that afflicts one woman out of three and one man out of two. I may be on a collision course with Teddy Goldsmith about Climate Change but we see eye to eye on cancer.

I am one of the healthiest people around. I never get ill. I spent a while in St Thomas' Hospital after being knocked over by a Royal Mail Van on Westminster Bridge in 1963...and have a 15 inch steel pin in my right femur to prove it. Wordsworth had the quaint notion that earth has not anything to show more fair than the view from this bridge...but forgive me for seeing things otherwise. There is a difference between having an accident and being ill.

Susan May lives in Jackson New Hampshire. Her children Kristen and Mischa were in the same classes at Cambridge Friends School in Massachusetts in 1980 as my children. So we go back 25 years. Susan has an endearing habit of turning up in out of the way places. The first stop on Vemara's Brittany voyages was always Barfleur...a tiny fishing village on the Cherbourg Peninsular with a post office, a bakery, a local store and a tabac. One year Susan was sitting drinking coffee outside the tabac in Barfleur when Vemara moored up after a 20-hour run down channel.

Until a few months ago Susan was the other person I knew who never got ill. But then back in February...while I was in Llangolman...Susan phoned me to tell me she had colon cancer...or rectal cancer as they call it on the other side of the North Atlantic Ocean in a Continental Megastate separated from two corners of Old Europe...England and Spain…by their common languages.

My mother probably died of colon cancer. She certainly caught it and undoubtedly died not very long afterwards. But she never told her children the cause of her rapid decline in 1999 at the age of 84. Five years on I am beginning to suspect...and wondering about using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain her medical records.

It seems that a third of us Fifty Somethings are destined to catch cancer...another third will die from heart problems...with Bird Flu taking the rest. Susan phoned me last night and we chatted for an hour or so. She has been driving back and forth to Portland Maine for thirty hours of radiation treatment, scans at hundreds of dollars a time...and a few altercations with the Health Professionals. Susan has written off 2006 as her own personal annus horribilis and can't wait for it to end so she can get on with her life.

As far back as the 1950s the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated that 80 to 90 percent of cancers could be environmentally caused and and fifty years on the WHO states that enough is known 'to prevent at least one-third of cancers'. Yet the WHO also talks of ten million cases worldwide increasing to 15 million by 2020. This may sound a lot but works out at less than a tenth of one percent so something doesn't add up.

Back in 1971 President Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer. Since then US federal spending on cancer has gone from a quarter of a billion dollars a year to three billion...with many times this being spent by private corporations and foundations in the Cancer Industry.

Yet in The West the cancer death rate continues to rise steadily…and has done so since the mid seventies. Indeed the rate has been increasing since the beginning of the industrial age. Previously cancer was very rare and in some areas non-existent. But a researcher working for Edward Goldsmith at The Ecologist in 1973 showed on the basis of WHO statistics that between 1967 and 1968 the cancer rate in different countries…Mauritius, Sri Lanka, Portugal and the USA…was almost directly proportionate to GNP.

In a special 1998 issue of The Ecologist magazine Ross Hume Hall and Dr Samuel Epstein argued that there is a Cancer Establishment…organisations like the National Cancer Institute & America Cancer Society in the USA and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in the UK…set on discouraging research into how industrial pollutants cause cancer.

Two articles on Edward Goldsmith’s website go further and insist that the main causes of cancer are (1) exposure to carcinogenic chemicals in the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe and (2) ionising radiation…from medical X-rays, nuclear tests and radioactive emissions from nuclear installations.

The Chemical, Pharmaceutical and Nuclear Industries that fund nearly all the research on the causes of cancer will not admit to anything like this. They make sure that cancer is attributed to anything except exposure to chemicals and radioactivity. So the official viewpoint blames minor factors like faulty genes, viruses, eating fatty foods, drinking alcohol and smoking...important in the case of Lung Cancer but nothing like as important as it is made out to be.

How long before the public realise that cancer is largely preventable and that if more of us are succumbing to the disease it is because our health is being systematically subordinated to the sordid financial interests of the chemical and the nuclear industries…a fact that bent government scientists are finding increasingly difficult to hide from us?