Americans are continuously bombarded with potentially cancer-causing agents from the world around us, according to a new report released today. The publication calls on the federal government to do more to investigate and limit people’s exposure to environmental toxins.

“That’s the only way we’ll protect workers, children and basically all of us,” said Jeanne Rizzo, president and chief executive of the Breast Cancer Fund, in a press conference.

The report — issued by the President’s Cancer Panel, which came about in 1971 as a result of President Richard Nixon’s so-called ‘War on Cancer’ — highlights the risks of known carcinogens, such as radon, X-rays and CT scans, but it is short on specific recommendations. Instead, it urges more research into poorly understood sources of exposure including cell phone radiation and bisphenol A, a common plastics ingredient.

The report was met with mixed reactions.

“There has been disproportionate emphasis on lifestyle factors and insufficient attention paid to discovering and controlling environmental exposures,” Philip Landrigan, director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City told MedPage. “This report marks a sea change.”

Meanwhile, the American Cancer Society (ACS) criticized the report for playing up the risks of environmental toxins and overlooking the known lifestyle choices known to cause most cases of cancer, including smoking, drinking, poor diet and lack of exercise. “The report is most provocative when it restates hypotheses as if they were established facts,” Michael Thun, ACS emeritus vice president of epidemiology, told Reuters.

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