That talk is EXCELLENT. Thank you for posting. I've been frustrated over the lack of accurate, scientifically sound nutritional guidance, and this talk provides a some.
It is probably the single best talk I've seen this year.
Dying of cancer is a good thing- it means you didn't die in childbirth or from malaria or diabetes. Cancer is a really big name for a lot of the tough diseases we don't yet have a cure for. This "tidal wave" is simply mortal humans living long enough that they start breaking on a molecular level. That may someday change but living long enough to die from cancer is, sadly, the grand prize in life. Not much of a prize but still better than the alternative.
Ah, but cancer is always the same thing, body cells going amok. The reasons are manifold and a lot of research is going on there, but the result is, broadly speaking, the same. (Of course you get different kinds of tumors..) It's hard to see how it can ever be eradicated for good since it's kind of part of the system and does not neccessarily have external causes (though in most cases is does).
And then there are other diseases we have no cure for yet, which are not cancer, such as Alzheimers and aids. We can eradicate those, I believe.
I don't really think it can be fixed either. Trying to cure all cancers is like trying to engineer a car that never, ever breaks for all eternity. Even if you left this hypothetical perfect sports car in the garage, the belts and tires and tubes would start to degrade eventually.
Better to try to replace each part as it breaks with an upgrade! That's my immortality plan- when my hearing breaks, get an implant. When the hip goes out, in goes a titanium one. You mind starts slipping? We're going to need some sort of prosthetic neurons, I'm thinking carbon nanotubes you inject into you spinal fluid and which self-assemble inside the brain. Eventually, enough meat has been replaced with tech that my mind can make the complete jump to software and at which point I shed this frail human form and proceed to explore the universe via self-replicating probes... Well, that's the plan anyways.
But either way, to beat cancer, you going to need to fundamentally redesign the human form.
ps (Elon Musk, if you are reading this, please contact me. I'm really don't want to die and I'm willing to act as a guinea pig towards that end)
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of biology.
You think that you have organs, but really, you have cells. When those cells break in a particular way, cancer results. 99.999% of those cancers are terminated. The rest can kill.
Preventing cancer is a matter of adding 9s to that statistic until death is implausible. Then, we run up against other senescence factors: our cells can only divide so many times, garbage accumulates that can't be purged, etc.
It's plausible to imagine a world where we no longer die of cancer, adding 10-20 years to the average lifespan. People will start to die of obscure diseases caused by genes no longer being present in their DNA.
So we work on fixing that. It's difficult, of course.
I want to add that we actually get cancer all the time (like, every day), but our bodies kill it successfully. That's why people with AIDS or bad nutrition get more cancer: they are not able to fight it anymore.
>> "Dying of cancer is a good thing- it means you didn't die in childbirth or from malaria or diabetes. That may change but living long enough to die from cancer is, sadly, the grand prize in life."
I kind of see your point but you seem to be forgetting about the children who die from cancer. Not to mention the types of cancer that are more common in younger people (e.g. testicular cancer). In the past living long enough to bear children may have been considered a good thing - you didn't die from an infection we had no cure for. The people who die from the disease probably don't see it the same way and I doubt you would either. Even though I understand your premise if I got cancer even in my 90's I wouldn't be thinking: "Wow, look how long I lived", I'd be thinking, "Shit, I have cancer".
> I kind of see your point but you seem to be forgetting about the children who die from cancer.
In the USA, 3X as many children die of car crashes than cancer, and solving car crashes is way easier than solving cancer. Want to save just as many kids as you would by curing cancer? Stop driving so fast.
The map in the article makes it look like the US and Europe are having a cancer epidemic, while the rest of the world has much lower numbers. What seem more likely is the 'west' is having a cancer detection epidemic. Just because cancer is detected doesn't mean that it is going to kill you. You could easily die from a heart attack before the cancer had significant negative effects, for example.
Is it the cancer? Or the treatment? I've lost several loved ones to cancer, and I'm not saying cancer is an easy way to go, but intensive chemotherapy that takes all the energy out of a person, and only prolongs someone's life by one agonizing painful year, seems worse to me than just letting the cancer consume you.
Of course you have no way of knowing ahead of time whether or not the treatments will work... If you have most of your life ahead of you, fight the cancer. But if I get cancer at 75 (which I very well may, if genetics play a role in these things), I'm considering choosing to forgo treatment in order to save everyone pain, time, and money. I just don't think it would be worth living like deathly sick person for potentially years, only to die at 82 of something else.
Cancer = numerou8s diseases and I wish they never just lumped them all into one category.
SAD THING another knock against pediatric cancer. Pediatric cancer get's less then 4% of Federal Funding and American Cancer Society gives less then 1% toward it. Now these numbers will be used to funnel more money away from finding a cure for neglected research. Not one new chemotherapy drug for pediatric cancer in 24 years!!!!
Also, if you looked up the number of pediatric cancer cases as a total of all cancer cases, the 4% makes sense. I dug the numbers up a while ago, but you can find them with a quick google search.
Young people, even children, certainly get cancer, but an individual's odds of getting cancer go up the longer they live. The article even states:
"The global cancer burden is increasing and quite markedly, due predominately to the ageing of the populations and population growth."
In other words, there are more people, and they're living longer. Therefore, more people are getting cancer. You can try to look at this as good news. We've (mostly) stamped out diseases like polio, leprosy, and tuberculosis. Now we have to worry about cancer, and unfortunately that's not an easy one to tackle (not that the other ones were either though).
The mechanism isn't entirely worked out, but the hypothesis is that immature breast cells are more likely to cause cancer, and that pregnancy and breastfeeding cause breast cells to mature into cells that are less likely to become cancerous.
24m by 2035 doesn't actually sound like that much. And the fact that most of the new cases will be coming from the developed world seems to speak more to the fact that life expectancy and pollution (due to development) in the developed world is increasing, meaning people are living longer, in more hazardous conditions, and are therefore more likely to get cancer.
There really doesn't seem to be anything to be alarmed about. There will be about 73million deaths in 2035 (looking at current death rates vs. expected world population). If everyone who gets cancer dies from it in a year, there will be 24m deaths due to it, although http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_survival_rates indicates that cancer seems to have a >70% survival rate, in general. In 20 years, it's likely that survival rate will also be reflected in developing countries. So really, only about 7.2m, or about 10%, of our mortality will likely be due to cancer. That's still a lot, and it's worthwhile to try to prevent as many of those deaths as possible. But cancer seems like it's not, statistically, our biggest threat.
The numbers mentioned in this article are numbers of cancer CASES, for the most part, not numbers of cancer deaths. The chart lower down in the article, captioned World Cancer Cases 2012, at least shows countries in different shadings based on cancer RATES (standardized to cases per 100,000 population, as is typical for international health statistics), but that mostly shows which countries have higher rates of diagnosis of cancer (or much lower rates of diseases that kill people when they are young) rather than countries where cancer is the main cause of death. Rates matter more than the raw number of cases in a world that still has a growing population.
If we look carefully at charts of death rates by all causes for either the United States or the developed world, we see that death rates from cancer and from most causes of death are still steadily falling at all ages. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.
Yes, we still need to do more research on cancer prevention and cancer treatment. Yes, the article is correct that smoking, infectious diseases (mostly viral, some of which are already preventable by vaccines), overuse of alcohol, and obesity all increase cancer risk, but you and I can do something about our use of tobacco, alcohol, and fattening food-and-activity lifestyle combinations today--we don't have to wait for more medical research to reduce our risk of cancer. The article kindly submitted here makes clear that making people more aware of what increases their cancer risk is one of the best interventions for reducing cancer rates and cancer mortality. As other comments have already correctly pointed out, a rise in the number of cancer cases worldwide first of all indicates that there are more people in the world than ever, and secondly indicates that fewer people are dying young of diseases linked to stark poverty. That's good news, on the whole.
I find it particularly frustrating that doctors of all people are so bad with statistics. I know people in general are bad with statistics, and when journalists misunderstand them I have some sympathy, because hey they probably got through college without seeing a number, but I expect more from doctors.
Is that really reasonable, though? Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives, and they almost certainly have less free time in which to immerse themselves in a field of math that isn't going to help them.
Journalists, on the other hand, often should or need to rely on statistics to convey useful and pertinent information in a meaningful way. That they often obviously aren't taught and otherwise usually don't learn statistics, or at least not effectively, strikes me as a much bigger problem than doctors who don't have that knowledge.
Now, the people who write reports like these, they should have and use a thorough working understanding of statistics. I'd say what's really missing is effective collaboration between the people who do the work and the people who should be doing and writing the analysis.
1. Some large percentage, possibly more than half, of what a doctor does is diagnosis and prognosis. This is all pure probability. Failure to understand the difference between Prob(A|B) and Prob(B|A) has nontrivial consequences.
2. Frontier areas of medicine -- oncology, psychiatry -- deal increasingly with uncommon situations that not necessarily happen with enough frequency for a doctor to develop a doctorly intuition. There are some great resources -- meta-analyses, for example -- out there, but if we keep cutting slack to practitioners and let them follow the word of "thought leaders", medicine becomes the prey of ideological waves and conceptual fashions.
> Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives...
You can't give patients good advice that allows them to make the trade-offs inherent in life without a solid grasp of statistics. Saying an IUD has 98% effectiveness is useless without citing the time span over which that probability is measured (2% will get pregnant per year, per 5 years, ever?) Saying that doing X increases the risk of outcome Y by Z% is useless without citing the base rate. Would you stop eating meat if it increased your risk of a rare cancer by 300% if the base rate was 0.01% (over a lifetime) to begin with? I don't know how you make diagnoses without knowing the relative statistical probability of conditions that may present with the same symptoms.
> Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives
I really think that depends on what they are doing. My girlfriend is a neurologist investigating new treatments from MS. She uses statistics packages daily. Her colleague has gone of to London for a year to study a statistics masters. Sure your average GP probably doesn't have much need for stats, but there are a lot of fields within medicine.
Unless they are practicing cargo cult medicine, doctors actually do need statistics regularly in their professional lives -- medicine isn't a static field and you can't keep up with the new results in the field without being able to understand and apply statistics.
Historically doctors have been the most educated people. Not many people went to Uni and very few had a Masters. Doctors had 5-7 years of rigorous education and did quite a bit of lifelong learning, including following scientific research. To most people, they were by far the most educated person they interacted with.
Today, a lot of people have degrees and even the ones who don't have the opportunity to engage with a lot of self education through the internet, a lot of it informal (like HN). Doctors are also more knowledgable than they were but the gap has narrowed. The difference between doctors and the median (or 75 percentile) person has narrowed. Obviously, they still know a helva lot more about medicine, especially in their specialization but when it comes to Science as a discipline or statistics/math/etc., they aren't that far ahead of the pack.
*BTW, oncologists are probably the most versed in science, research methodology & statistics because they participate in a lot of research and choosing a course of treatment may be a choice between treatments based of studies with samples of insufficient size or duration to make absolute statements about. One study follows remission rates of patients segmented by the presence of specific genes in the cancer. Another remission rates for a slightly modified treatment and slightly different segmentation. etc.
Anyway, I don't think cases is irrelevant or incorrect thing to look at here. The number of cases is the number of people that need to be treated. If you are talking about prevention, the number of cases is a relevant indicator of success.
Can't you say the same thing about infectious diseases, yet we have found a general tool(vaccine) to fight them off. Isn't it likely that some of the work done will generate a highly generic tool, that with a few changes could fit to new types of cancer ?
Essentially yes, but trying to eradicate cancer is like trying to eradicate all the infectious diseases. (I don’t even know which problem is more difficult.)
The infectious diseases can be classified by the pathogen: virus and bacteria (and prions?). We have vaccines for a few of them, it’s an important subset because they caused many dead. Vaccines are very specific, each one is against only one illness, or even only against some strains of the pathogens. (It’s possible to combine some of them to reduce the number of independent shots.)
We have eradicated smallpox! And I hope we will eradicate polio in my lifetime. There are many generic antibiotics against a lot of bacteria, and recently appeared some antiviral drugs. But the eradication or cure of all the infectious diseases is still a very long term objective.
The treatment for cancer has improved a lot. It’s a more difficult statistic that simply counting the number of dead, but it’s a hope. Also the tools for diagnosis have improved a lot, and that reduces the rate of false negatives and false positives, for example MRI.
Some cancers are clearly linked to virus. The most well known case is the cervical cancer (and a few similar cancers in other parts of the body). It’s (mostly) caused by the Human papillomavirus. There is a recent vaccine against the HPV, and it’s beginning to be applied massively. So I hope that in 50 years the number of cervical cancers will have lowered an almost disappear, but there will be still cervical cancer dew to radiation, chemical mutations, and other causes. There are other cancers that probably have a viral origin, and perhaps it’s possible to create a vaccine and eradicate them.
It’s possible to eliminate or cure some types of cancer, but a complete solution is almost impossible.
Those who have a pregnancy before 20 years of age versus those who have a pregnancy after 35 years of age show a 50% reduction in their risk of breast cancer.
I assume you want more than "let me google that for you"
Delayed parenthood: old eggs are around 1% more likely to result in childhood cancers (more or less, at least sometimes, per some swedes). A bit controversial although it seems fairly common sense. Obviously a 45 year old woman's eggs will have been exposed to three times the radiation as a 15 year old girl's eggs, and given that I'm surprised the net childhood cancer risk was so low. From the original paper, which I'm probably misinterpreting, if the kid lives to age 5, there's no further measurable effect, so either the cancer kills them young or it has no effect, and I have no common sense explanation for that...
Fewer children: Seems fairly well proven across many papers that time spent pregnant equals lower ovarian cancer risk. This does not appear controversial. Then again time spent pregnant does seem to increase pregnancy related mortality (duh) so not entirely sure its a net positive.
No idea at all about the last claim. Probably something lactation hormone related. I don't think mere calcium loss is a legit anti-cancer treatment.
This part struck me as a little ominous: '"The extent to which we modify the availability of alcohol, the labelling of alcohol, the promotion of alcohol and the price of alcohol - those things should be on the agenda."
He said there was a similar argument to be had with sugar fuelling obesity, which in turn affected cancer risk.'
I'm all for educating the public, but why does it seem that education is never enough for some, and instead the next step needs to be behavior modification through scarcity?
Haven't we seen this fail in the U.S. with the ridiculous restrictions on some over-the-counter medications, the War on Drugs, and Prohibition?
As someone that grew up in Southern Europe I am at times surprised and shocked by the relation Americans and Canadians have with alcohol.
In Portugal, Spain and Italy alcohol is food. We drink at home, with the family, a great amount of wine and a little beer. Wine and beer are openly sold in supermarkets, close to other food. However, the biggest alcoholism problem we have are American, British and Australian tourists binge drinking in our beaches.
OTOH, in North America it seems there are only 2 extreme ways of handling alcohol: the Russian-like approach and the Muslim-like panic. Teenagers and poor people abuse it and drink heavily, all the others are obsessively scared of it.
> OTOH, in North America it seems there are only 2 extreme ways of handling alcohol: the Russian-like approach and the Muslim-like panic. Teenagers and poor people abuse it and drink heavily, all the others are obsessively scared of it.
This isn't true at all. You're seeing the extreme cases and generalizing it to everybody. We may have a higher incidence of alcoholism and alcohol abuse (I don't know the numbers), but the vast majority of Americans use alcohol occasionally and responsibly.
Modification of promotion and pricing seem to make sense to me.
Education is important but for many people in the developed world their exposure to liquor ads on TV is a lot more prevalent than their exposure to education. You're fighting a losing battle if you're competing directly with the messages of liquor companies (same thing in tobacco industry).
As for pricing, in many countries including the US with their new insurance system the cost of healthcare is being shared across large groups. In Canada we tax liquor at a rate of about 130% and feed much of that revenue directly into our healthcare system. This way the more you drink the more you contribute to your future expense to the healthcare system.
If you get a chance to read it, you'll find the studies of the effects of some animal proteins, specifically casein, on propensity to develop cancer when organisms are challenged by mutagens and carcinogens to be rigorous science and important for our daily lives.
The book encourages eating vegan, which is not hard, just different, and is a diet whose positive health effects are supported by large scale epidemiological studies.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadhttp://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/09/why-alcohol-i...
Watched it sipping sugared tea over a slice of apple pie though.
It is probably the single best talk I've seen this year.
And then there are other diseases we have no cure for yet, which are not cancer, such as Alzheimers and aids. We can eradicate those, I believe.
Better to try to replace each part as it breaks with an upgrade! That's my immortality plan- when my hearing breaks, get an implant. When the hip goes out, in goes a titanium one. You mind starts slipping? We're going to need some sort of prosthetic neurons, I'm thinking carbon nanotubes you inject into you spinal fluid and which self-assemble inside the brain. Eventually, enough meat has been replaced with tech that my mind can make the complete jump to software and at which point I shed this frail human form and proceed to explore the universe via self-replicating probes... Well, that's the plan anyways.
But either way, to beat cancer, you going to need to fundamentally redesign the human form.
ps (Elon Musk, if you are reading this, please contact me. I'm really don't want to die and I'm willing to act as a guinea pig towards that end)
You think that you have organs, but really, you have cells. When those cells break in a particular way, cancer results. 99.999% of those cancers are terminated. The rest can kill.
Preventing cancer is a matter of adding 9s to that statistic until death is implausible. Then, we run up against other senescence factors: our cells can only divide so many times, garbage accumulates that can't be purged, etc.
It's plausible to imagine a world where we no longer die of cancer, adding 10-20 years to the average lifespan. People will start to die of obscure diseases caused by genes no longer being present in their DNA.
So we work on fixing that. It's difficult, of course.
I kind of see your point but you seem to be forgetting about the children who die from cancer. Not to mention the types of cancer that are more common in younger people (e.g. testicular cancer). In the past living long enough to bear children may have been considered a good thing - you didn't die from an infection we had no cure for. The people who die from the disease probably don't see it the same way and I doubt you would either. Even though I understand your premise if I got cancer even in my 90's I wouldn't be thinking: "Wow, look how long I lived", I'd be thinking, "Shit, I have cancer".
In the USA, 3X as many children die of car crashes than cancer, and solving car crashes is way easier than solving cancer. Want to save just as many kids as you would by curing cancer? Stop driving so fast.
http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm
http://www.childdeathreview.org/nationalchildmortalitydata.h...
Hopefully more computer assisted driving will make a big difference to road traffic deaths.
Of course you have no way of knowing ahead of time whether or not the treatments will work... If you have most of your life ahead of you, fight the cancer. But if I get cancer at 75 (which I very well may, if genetics play a role in these things), I'm considering choosing to forgo treatment in order to save everyone pain, time, and money. I just don't think it would be worth living like deathly sick person for potentially years, only to die at 82 of something else.
The radiation and chemo helped my aunt live about 10 years longer than she would have if left untreated. It was totally worth it.
Plus, the drugs at the hospital helped ease the pain when she passed.
SAD THING another knock against pediatric cancer. Pediatric cancer get's less then 4% of Federal Funding and American Cancer Society gives less then 1% toward it. Now these numbers will be used to funnel more money away from finding a cure for neglected research. Not one new chemotherapy drug for pediatric cancer in 24 years!!!!
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/druginfo/fda-nelarabine
Also, if you looked up the number of pediatric cancer cases as a total of all cancer cases, the 4% makes sense. I dug the numbers up a while ago, but you can find them with a quick google search.
Having your first pregnancy before 20 versus after 35 lowers your chance of breast cancer by 50%.
For each birth, breast cancer risk decreases by 7%.
For each year of breast feeding, breast cancer risks decreases by 4%
Source: http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/prevention/breast/hea...
The mechanism isn't entirely worked out, but the hypothesis is that immature breast cells are more likely to cause cancer, and that pregnancy and breastfeeding cause breast cells to mature into cells that are less likely to become cancerous.
This paper explores the mechanism more: http://erc.endocrinology-journals.org/content/14/4/907.full
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/oral-contr...
There really doesn't seem to be anything to be alarmed about. There will be about 73million deaths in 2035 (looking at current death rates vs. expected world population). If everyone who gets cancer dies from it in a year, there will be 24m deaths due to it, although http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_survival_rates indicates that cancer seems to have a >70% survival rate, in general. In 20 years, it's likely that survival rate will also be reflected in developing countries. So really, only about 7.2m, or about 10%, of our mortality will likely be due to cancer. That's still a lot, and it's worthwhile to try to prevent as many of those deaths as possible. But cancer seems like it's not, statistically, our biggest threat.
If we look carefully at charts of death rates by all causes for either the United States or the developed world, we see that death rates from cancer and from most causes of death are still steadily falling at all ages. Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/195977021257786739/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...
Yes, we still need to do more research on cancer prevention and cancer treatment. Yes, the article is correct that smoking, infectious diseases (mostly viral, some of which are already preventable by vaccines), overuse of alcohol, and obesity all increase cancer risk, but you and I can do something about our use of tobacco, alcohol, and fattening food-and-activity lifestyle combinations today--we don't have to wait for more medical research to reduce our risk of cancer. The article kindly submitted here makes clear that making people more aware of what increases their cancer risk is one of the best interventions for reducing cancer rates and cancer mortality. As other comments have already correctly pointed out, a rise in the number of cancer cases worldwide first of all indicates that there are more people in the world than ever, and secondly indicates that fewer people are dying young of diseases linked to stark poverty. That's good news, on the whole.
Is that really reasonable, though? Doctors don't have a use for statistics in their daily professional lives, and they almost certainly have less free time in which to immerse themselves in a field of math that isn't going to help them.
Journalists, on the other hand, often should or need to rely on statistics to convey useful and pertinent information in a meaningful way. That they often obviously aren't taught and otherwise usually don't learn statistics, or at least not effectively, strikes me as a much bigger problem than doctors who don't have that knowledge.
Now, the people who write reports like these, they should have and use a thorough working understanding of statistics. I'd say what's really missing is effective collaboration between the people who do the work and the people who should be doing and writing the analysis.
2. Frontier areas of medicine -- oncology, psychiatry -- deal increasingly with uncommon situations that not necessarily happen with enough frequency for a doctor to develop a doctorly intuition. There are some great resources -- meta-analyses, for example -- out there, but if we keep cutting slack to practitioners and let them follow the word of "thought leaders", medicine becomes the prey of ideological waves and conceptual fashions.
You can't give patients good advice that allows them to make the trade-offs inherent in life without a solid grasp of statistics. Saying an IUD has 98% effectiveness is useless without citing the time span over which that probability is measured (2% will get pregnant per year, per 5 years, ever?) Saying that doing X increases the risk of outcome Y by Z% is useless without citing the base rate. Would you stop eating meat if it increased your risk of a rare cancer by 300% if the base rate was 0.01% (over a lifetime) to begin with? I don't know how you make diagnoses without knowing the relative statistical probability of conditions that may present with the same symptoms.
I really think that depends on what they are doing. My girlfriend is a neurologist investigating new treatments from MS. She uses statistics packages daily. Her colleague has gone of to London for a year to study a statistics masters. Sure your average GP probably doesn't have much need for stats, but there are a lot of fields within medicine.
Today, a lot of people have degrees and even the ones who don't have the opportunity to engage with a lot of self education through the internet, a lot of it informal (like HN). Doctors are also more knowledgable than they were but the gap has narrowed. The difference between doctors and the median (or 75 percentile) person has narrowed. Obviously, they still know a helva lot more about medicine, especially in their specialization but when it comes to Science as a discipline or statistics/math/etc., they aren't that far ahead of the pack.
*BTW, oncologists are probably the most versed in science, research methodology & statistics because they participate in a lot of research and choosing a course of treatment may be a choice between treatments based of studies with samples of insufficient size or duration to make absolute statements about. One study follows remission rates of patients segmented by the presence of specific genes in the cancer. Another remission rates for a slightly modified treatment and slightly different segmentation. etc.
Anyway, I don't think cases is irrelevant or incorrect thing to look at here. The number of cases is the number of people that need to be treated. If you are talking about prevention, the number of cases is a relevant indicator of success.
The infectious diseases can be classified by the pathogen: virus and bacteria (and prions?). We have vaccines for a few of them, it’s an important subset because they caused many dead. Vaccines are very specific, each one is against only one illness, or even only against some strains of the pathogens. (It’s possible to combine some of them to reduce the number of independent shots.)
We have eradicated smallpox! And I hope we will eradicate polio in my lifetime. There are many generic antibiotics against a lot of bacteria, and recently appeared some antiviral drugs. But the eradication or cure of all the infectious diseases is still a very long term objective.
The treatment for cancer has improved a lot. It’s a more difficult statistic that simply counting the number of dead, but it’s a hope. Also the tools for diagnosis have improved a lot, and that reduces the rate of false negatives and false positives, for example MRI.
Some cancers are clearly linked to virus. The most well known case is the cervical cancer (and a few similar cancers in other parts of the body). It’s (mostly) caused by the Human papillomavirus. There is a recent vaccine against the HPV, and it’s beginning to be applied massively. So I hope that in 50 years the number of cervical cancers will have lowered an almost disappear, but there will be still cervical cancer dew to radiation, chemical mutations, and other causes. There are other cancers that probably have a viral origin, and perhaps it’s possible to create a vaccine and eradicate them.
It’s possible to eliminate or cure some types of cancer, but a complete solution is almost impossible.
Can someone explain this? I'm guessing it's something referring to cervical cancer.
Those who have a pregnancy before 20 years of age versus those who have a pregnancy after 35 years of age show a 50% reduction in their risk of breast cancer.
http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/prevention/breast/hea...
Delayed parenthood: old eggs are around 1% more likely to result in childhood cancers (more or less, at least sometimes, per some swedes). A bit controversial although it seems fairly common sense. Obviously a 45 year old woman's eggs will have been exposed to three times the radiation as a 15 year old girl's eggs, and given that I'm surprised the net childhood cancer risk was so low. From the original paper, which I'm probably misinterpreting, if the kid lives to age 5, there's no further measurable effect, so either the cancer kills them young or it has no effect, and I have no common sense explanation for that...
Fewer children: Seems fairly well proven across many papers that time spent pregnant equals lower ovarian cancer risk. This does not appear controversial. Then again time spent pregnant does seem to increase pregnancy related mortality (duh) so not entirely sure its a net positive.
No idea at all about the last claim. Probably something lactation hormone related. I don't think mere calcium loss is a legit anti-cancer treatment.
He said there was a similar argument to be had with sugar fuelling obesity, which in turn affected cancer risk.'
I'm all for educating the public, but why does it seem that education is never enough for some, and instead the next step needs to be behavior modification through scarcity?
Haven't we seen this fail in the U.S. with the ridiculous restrictions on some over-the-counter medications, the War on Drugs, and Prohibition?
In Portugal, Spain and Italy alcohol is food. We drink at home, with the family, a great amount of wine and a little beer. Wine and beer are openly sold in supermarkets, close to other food. However, the biggest alcoholism problem we have are American, British and Australian tourists binge drinking in our beaches.
OTOH, in North America it seems there are only 2 extreme ways of handling alcohol: the Russian-like approach and the Muslim-like panic. Teenagers and poor people abuse it and drink heavily, all the others are obsessively scared of it.
This isn't true at all. You're seeing the extreme cases and generalizing it to everybody. We may have a higher incidence of alcoholism and alcohol abuse (I don't know the numbers), but the vast majority of Americans use alcohol occasionally and responsibly.
Education is important but for many people in the developed world their exposure to liquor ads on TV is a lot more prevalent than their exposure to education. You're fighting a losing battle if you're competing directly with the messages of liquor companies (same thing in tobacco industry).
As for pricing, in many countries including the US with their new insurance system the cost of healthcare is being shared across large groups. In Canada we tax liquor at a rate of about 130% and feed much of that revenue directly into our healthcare system. This way the more you drink the more you contribute to your future expense to the healthcare system.
If you get a chance to read it, you'll find the studies of the effects of some animal proteins, specifically casein, on propensity to develop cancer when organisms are challenged by mutagens and carcinogens to be rigorous science and important for our daily lives.
The book encourages eating vegan, which is not hard, just different, and is a diet whose positive health effects are supported by large scale epidemiological studies.