How Government Health Agencies Obscure the Impact of Environmental Pollution and Perpetuate Reductionist Framings of Disease: The Case of Leukemia

Abstract

Since the 1970s, environmental health researchers have documented environmental pollution's impacts on human health, which includes the bioaccumulation of industrial chemicals and how these toxicants contribute to disease. However, the relationship between disease and pollution is often difficult to discern in the disease information provided by dominant institutions. Previous scholarship has identified that print media, television news, online medical publishers, and medical associations consistently obscure the environmental causation frame. However, less has been said about disease information provided by public health agencies. To address this gap, I analyzed the leukemia information provided by Cancer Australia, the United States’ National Institutes of Health, and the United Kingdom's National Health Service. My analysis shows that the disease information offered by these health agencies also obscures the environmental causation frame by failing to identify most toxicants that environmental health researchers have linked to leukemia and by emphasizing a biomedical framing of the medical condition. Beyond documenting the problem, this article also discusses the social consequences and sources of the problem.