Cancer is mostly man-made scientists suggest

[Tycho Brahe]

Cancer isn't manmade anymore than leprosy or chicken pox is.

HIV is man-made. In labs by CIA and Mossad to keep the black man down. And the black woman.

Hey, I don't know about you, but I'll take an increased cancer rate in exchange for modern technology. I've never really understood why people bemoan the relatively minor costs of living when we do. I mean, we still managed to increase the life expectancy by a factor of ~3.

I'll take modern tchnology (and medicine) with less pollution and toxins, if at alle possible. Thank you.

And fries on the side.

 

[El_Machinae]

For people saying that you can't access the article: you should be able to access it through your university library with your university sign-in.

 

[classical_hero]

Tobacco is natural. Humans though made the decision to smoke it (burning creates toxic compounds) and mass produce cigarettes (including various additives).

You can get cancer just from chewing it.

 

[gangleri2001]

Sure it does. Certain human activities (like smoking, working/living in highly polluted areas, certain diets, etc.) produce more cancers than others so if we avoid or minimize those activities we reduce our risk.

Trying to avoid certain activities that lead to cancer is useless because cancer itself cannot be cured, which means that people will suffer form these diseases anyways. So no, it doesn't help at all.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, firstly, many cancers can be cured, and if we support research, even more will be cured. Secondly, avoiding the risk essentially delays cancer while many preventing any specific cancer. A delayed cancer is bought time, and vastly reduces the total suffering one would experience. (and, as well, a delayed cancer onset increases the likelihood of a cure being developed in time).

 

[Masada]

I wonder what the incidence of cancer related death in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is?

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Sure it does. Certain human activities (like smoking, working/living in highly polluted areas, certain diets, etc.) produce more cancers than others so if we avoid or minimize those activities we reduce our risk.

But we already know that.

 

[Bill3000]

Trying to avoid certain activities that lead to cancer is useless because cancer itself cannot be cured, which means that people will suffer form these diseases anyways. So no, it doesn't help at all.

That doesn't make any sense. We try to avoid uncurable viruses, and thus we can try to avoid carcinogens. You can evade lung cancer by not smoking.

 

[Zelig]

That doesn't make any sense. We try to avoid uncurable viruses, and thus we can try to avoid carcinogens. You can evade lung cancer by not smoking.

Not if the only available job is in an asbestos mine.

 

[Bill3000]

Not if the only available job is in an asbestos mine.

Well you could always be unemployed.

 

[lutzj]

Well you could always be unemployed.

How will I afford rent in a carcinogen-free home?

 

[uppi]

But you expect the spin-off to have the same quality controls as the mothership, right?

No, actually not. The spin-offs usually have less stringent requirements to get published and are run by a different editor. A lot of papers published there have been rejected from Nature before.

But that does not mean that the quality control in the spin-offs is bad. They certainly do reject claims made out of thin air and peer review is going to reject the crackpots.

The actual article, does not claim much, anyway, and is more of a review article than a new discovery. It is a moot point to discuss about quality control, when the statements are so weak (in the article, it seems they were much more agressive with their statements to the press) that they are easily defendable.

Ah, ok, thanks very much for more information though. As usual most of us just won't have access to the articles I guess (but sometimes you find out it is something that's free online and just don't know it, that's what I was asking) and that's fine - but that should be recognized I think, people are gonna ask questions that we can't know without reading the study firsthand, and I would agree as usual the media/journalists misinterpret or blow things out of proportion.

Yes, often their is a free (pre-)version somewhere out there. But without being in the field, it is hard to know where. And obviously the journals will not include a link to the free version.

In physics there often is a preprint on the arXiv, but I have no idea if there is something similar for cancer research.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Finding only one case of the disease in the investigation of hundreds of Egyptian mummies, with few references to cancer in literary evidence, proves that cancer was extremely rare in antiquity. The disease rate has risen massively since the Industrial Revolution, in particular childhood cancer – proving that the rise is not simply due to people living longer.

Actually, neither of those are proof of anything.

 

[Akka]

Furthermore, cancer is of course man-made. Even if we magically did everything "cleanly", your bodies would be more susceptible to cancer on account of that we're living longer and giving our bodies more time to eventually break down and malfunction.

When you already live in a world with a short life-expectancy, what do you expect?

I kind of concur with EL_Mac on this line of thought...

Let's quote the text that you both answer to :

The disease rate has risen massively since the Industrial Revolution, in particular childhood cancer – proving that the rise is not simply due to people living longer.

 

[Verbose]

"Man made" seems an overstatement. Present levels of first-world longevity is also "man made" if so, and the relationship between cancer and age is pretty damn strong. Stop living for such an ungodly and historically "unnatural" long time, and that cancer problem will clear itself up in no time.

That said, knowing what we know about human bodies and how they interact with its environment over time, it makes a lot of sense to try to tackle cancer preemptively. Longer healthy and still productive lives would seem a good in itself.

 

[GoodGame]

I'm pretty sure they did control for aging, based on other summaries of the study that I've read.

Bolded. They basically examined bone cancer on the hypothesis that those cancers should have shown up even within the lifespans of the ancients.

I'd say this article has a lot of conjecture in it, so the end conclusion they draw really is suggestive like the thread title says.

Why are ancient tumours rare?

It has been suggested that the short lifespan of individuals in antiquity precluded the development of cancer. Mortality tables are not available for ancient populations; in fact, even total population figures are largely estimates, and standardized epidemiological studies are lacking38. However, there is conclusive evidence from ancient Egypt, for example, that the average life expectancy of the whole population, over a period from c.4000 BCE to c.400 CE, was much lower than in contemporary society. Information about an individual's life and career that is provided by tomb and coffin inscriptions, together with the palaeopathological evidence, confirms that the average lifespan of the wealthier classes was between 40 and 50 years, and a lower age-at-death of between 25 and 30 years is shown in palaeopathological studies of non-elite groups. Although life expectancy was statistically lowered by infant and maternal mortality and infectious diseases, many individuals did live to a sufficiently advanced age to develop other degenerative diseases, such as atherosclerosis39, Paget's disease of bone40 and arthritis41. As recently as fifteenth century England, life expectancy was 50 years for males and 30 years for females42. It must also be remembered that, in modern populations, tumours arising in bone primarily affect the young, so a similar pattern would be expected in ancient populations. Therefore, the rarity of tumours in ancient populations could be a result of factors other than life expectancy.

Another explanation for the rarity of tumours in ancient remains is that tumours might not be well preserved; however, experimental studies43 show that mummification preserves the features of malignancy (Fig. 2). In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all preserved specimens. Although the palaeopathological diagnosis of cancer is subject to many difficulties7, we propose that the minimal diagnostic evidence for cancer in ancient remains indicates the rarity of the disease in antiquity. Carcinogenic environmental factors have been linked to up to 75% of human cancers44, and the rarity of cancer in antiquity suggests that such factors are limited to societies that are affected by modern lifestyle issues such as tobacco use and pollution resulting from industrialization45, 46.

 

[GoodGame]

Hardly anyone dies from TB in the western world nowadays.

TB evolved antibiotic resistance though and is coming back.

 

[aukrest]

Not a surprise here. I've always been wondering with all these cancer commercials and things I hear, if it is this bad now, then how did people live for long back when they were always in the sun?

 

[ZeletDude]

Of course it is with all the man made chemicals we surround our selves in it is bound to be..

 

[Miles Teg]

Bolded. They basically examined bone cancer on the hypothesis that those cancers should have shown up even within the lifespans of the ancients.

The problem is that bone cancer, even though it's prevalent among children, isn't really common. For every 400 children, only 1 will get cancer every year, and the mortality rate is lower. While we do have a lot of mummies from Ancient Egypt (including child mummies), we don't have near enough to diagnose cancer rates.