If the chronicler had taken his old father to the Bayonne Chamber on October 30th to listen to the doctor Dominique Belpomme, he would not have left without listening to a smiling responsable. How many times have we not been told that there was a time when there was less disease than there is now? We told them so many times that the answer was a matter of knowledge. The cancerologist Belpomme would have given a reason to our working farmer father, born in 1916.

For the fourth time, the Chamber of Agriculture has organized the Fair of Sustainable Agriculture Territama in Bayonne, in Glain on the edge of Errobi, an area that the city council has built for the service of associations. By naming Dominique Belpomme as the godfather in this edition, the main talk at the fair was for him. He focused on the importance of eating organic food for cancer prevention.
But Estreina provided an overview of the state of major diseases in industrialized societies. It would surprise those who do not know Belpomme’s ideas in detail: the cancer has become an epidemic and not only cancer, obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular diseases, allergies, neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, autism... have proliferated and will continue to proliferate: it is said that they cannot be controlled.

Belpomme has already explained these ideas in his books. In what bears the title Ces maladies creées par l’homme (These diseases caused by human beings), he says from the beginning that since World War II we have been suffocated by rural disease again. That is to say, until then medicine had made great advances in the healing of diseases caused by microbes, essentially bacteria, but since then everything has been different.

To give two examples, Dr. Alzheimer described the disease of the same name in 1911, because it was previously very rare. As for the chancellor, the fact that cancers that were considered rare when Belpomm himself, who is 67 years old, was a young doctor, are widespread today. To prove this, the cancer pathologist often cites statistics.

And what is at the root of the great multiplication of evils? Belpomm considers as wrong the agents that have often been mentioned: stress, lifestyle, population aging, food... Not because they have no harmful effects, but because they require one more condition to create a cancer: some mutagenic substance is needed for cells to transform uncontrollably and begin to proliferate.
They can be mutagens or viruses, or radiations or chemicals, and the fact that they have spread so much in our environment is what Belpomme associates with the cancerers. He essentially plunged himself into chemical contamination during the conference and delivered the following sentence to the audience: “Those 100-year-olds you know now have reached that age because they knew a childhood without pollution. This is not going to happen in our generation.”

Small, uninterrupted doses

The words, articles and books of
Dominique Belpomme would be anecdotes if he were not the leading cancer pathologist in France and Europe and did not have the consensus of many other professionals around him. Some of them meet at the Association pour la Recherche pour la Recherche Thérapeutique Anti-Cancéreuse (ARTAC), but encouraged by this, the documents and treaties agreed in France have brought together many more professionals.

Belpomm has worked as a doctor, has worked in research, taught at the university, and even participated in public planning when he was asked for advice by political authorities. For a moment Jacques Chirac asked him to manage the planning against cancer. Today he is much more distrustful of what the authorities are doing in this, thinking that they are not doing enough in the prevention of diseases.

When the Paris government launched Les Grenelles de l’Invironnement in 2007, relations between politicians and doctors did not go well and they eventually presented an alternative document. It is enlightening.

In contrast to the passivity of medical associations in pollution matters in the Southern Basque Country and in Spain in general, it is striking to see the main French medical association – Ordre des Medecins –, health unions and other important associations join the demands that demand a more insane control of pollution. In the second seven-point document released on the occasion of the 2007 Grenelles, the government was asked to halt projects to build new incineration plants. That's the moratorium on cremation.

“Ecology and health are linked, so is the cancer and the environment,” writes Belpomm a thousand times. In the case of tobacco, it was difficult to bring to law the link that researchers have long discovered. Now, however, the fact is that even as tobacco use begins to decline, lung cancers continue to proliferate, a sign that they are pollutants in the air we breathe.
Since World War II, chemical waste of all classes has been introduced to the population as superficially through the respiratory tract and orally through food. Belpomm in Bayonne, in front of a large audience concerned with agriculture, placed special emphasis on nitrates and pesticides used in crops, not forgetting preservatives, colourants, etc. that are included in processed foods. But he didn’t forget the dangerous chemicals in cosmetics, which we have in household appliances, and the dioxins that the industries take off.

Speaking of dioxins, the controversy surrounding the incineration plants is not alien to the people of ARTAC. Contrary to the politicians and technicians who say that the new incinerators, unlike the older ones, have good filters and are safe, Belpomme himself becomes a hot militant.

“Today we know,” says Ces maladies..., “that cancer drugs do harm not in high doses, but in small doses repeated over a long period of time. (...) The limits imposed by international standards on poisons that may be present in water, food or air are not sufficient to prevent harm, because after all, the repetition of the dose and its duration over time are important, the dose that the organism has accumulated at all times.” Belpomme was asked to comment on the planned construction of the incineration plant on the island of Mauritius, France '

s overseas territory, in 2009. He enthusiastically encouraged them not to despair in the document “Open letter to the Mauritians”: “At all costs, the incinerator must be stopped, knowing that alternatives exist... All Mauritians must mobilize.”