Bacon Shown To Increase Cancer Risk By 19%
Yet another item to scratch off the menu (and the same goes for other processed meats, to perhaps no disinformation reader’s surprise). From the Press Association via The Guardian:
Eating two rashers of bacon a day can increase the risk of pancreatic cancer by 19% and the risk goes up if a person eats more, experts have said.
Eating 50g of processed meat every day – the equivalent to one sausage or two rashers of bacon – increases the risk by 19%, compared to people who do not eat processed meat at all.
For people consuming double this amount of processed meat (100g), the increased risk jumps to 38%, and is 57% for those eating 150g a day. But experts cautioned that the overall risk of pancreatic cancer was relatively low – in the UK, the lifetime risk of developing the disease is one in 77 for men and one in 79 for…
Chavez Suggests US May Have Caused Cancer In Political Enemies
Considering the many bizarre attempts to poison Fidel Castro, it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility that the CIA would try to engender a terminal disease in Hugo Chavez and sympathizers. From Bloomberg News:
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez hinted that the U.S. may be behind a “very strange” bout of cancer affecting several leaders aligned with him in South America.
Chavez, speaking a day after Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, said the Central Intelligence Agency was behind chemical experiments in Guatemala in the 1940s and that it’s possible that in years to come a plot will be uncovered that shows the U.S. spread cancer as a political weapon against its critics.
“It’s very difficult to explain, even with the law of probabilities, what has been happening to some of us in Latin America,” Chavez said in a nationally televised speech to the military. “Would it be…
Lifestyle Causes 40% Of Cancers
OK, so now that you know you can drastically reduce your chances of developing cancer, will you change your lifestyle? Michelle Roberts reports for BBC News that you should:
Nearly half of cancers diagnosed in the UK each year – over 130,000 in total – are caused by avoidable life choices including smoking, drinking and eating the wrong things, a review reveals.
Tobacco is the biggest culprit, causing 23% of cases in men and 15.6% in women, says the Cancer Research UK report.
Next comes a lack of fresh fruit and vegetables in men’s diets, while for women it is being overweight.
BBC News
The report is published in the British Journal of Cancer.
Its authors claim it is the most comprehensive analysis to date on the subject.
Lead author Prof Max Parkin said: “Many people believe cancer is down to fate or ‘in the genes’ and that it is the luck of the draw whether they get…
Penis Cancer Linked To Sex With Animals
Photo: Waugsberg (CC)
A warning for zoophiles from MSNBC:
For many people, bestiality is a bad joke, but for some it could be a matter of life or death, according to a new study finding that men who had sex with animals in their lifetimes were twice as likely to develop cancer of the penis as others.
The study of 492 men from rural Brazil found that 35 percent of study participants, who ranged from 18 to 80 years old and included both penile cancer patients and healthy men, reported having sex with animals (SWA) in their lifetimes. A team of urologists from centers around Brazil co-authored the paper, which looked at risk factors for penile cancer in men who had visited 16 urology and oncology centers in 12 Brazilian cities. In addition to SWA, three other risk factors for penile cancer were found: smoking, the presence of premalignant lesions on the penis and…
U.S. Government Glossed Over Cancer Concerns As It Rolled Out Airport X-Ray Scanners
Michael Grabell reports on ProPublica:
On Sept. 23, 1998, a panel of radiation safety experts gathered at a Hilton hotel in Maryland to evaluate a new device that could detect hidden weapons and contraband. The machine, known as the Secure 1000, beamed X-rays at people to see underneath their clothing.
One after another, the experts convened by the Food and Drug Administration raised questions about the machine because it violated a longstanding principle in radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be X-rayed unless there is a medical benefit.
“I think this is really a slippery slope,” said Jill Lipoti, who was the director of New Jersey’s radiation protection program. The device was already deployed in prisons; what was next, she and others asked — courthouses, schools, airports? “I am concerned … with expanding this type of product for the traveling public,” said another panelist, Stanley Savic, the vice president for safety at a…
President Obama Issues Executive Order To Ease Shortages in Vital Medicines
Whatever Obama does, the Republicans will say it’s the wrong thing to do … but wouldn’t it be something if he dealt with the root of the problem (Big Pharma)? Lara Salahi reports for ABC News:
While many advocates say President Obama’s executive order to reduce a dire shortage of life-saving hospital medications is an essential step, others say the order is not enough to stop price gouging by some pharmaceutical companies.
Essential cancer drugs have arguably taken the hardest hit. Hospitals have reported the worst shortage in nearly a decade of chemotherapy agents like doxorubicin.
The new order instructs the Food and Drug Administration to broaden reporting of potential drug shortages, expedite regulatory reviews that can help prevent shortages, and examine whether potential shortages have led to price gouging. The drug shortage has compromised or delayed care for some patients and may have led to otherwise preventable deaths.
Christopher W. Hansen, president of…
Ecstasy As Cancer Cure
Ecstasy (MDMA)
Who would have thought – popping an E could cure cancer! From BBC News:
Modified ecstasy could one day have a role to play in fighting some blood cancers, according to scientists.
Ecstasy is known to kill some cancer cells, but scientists have increased its effectiveness 100-fold, they said in Investigational New Drugs journal.
Their early study showed all leukaemia, lymphoma and myeloma cells could be killed in a test tube, but any treatment would be a decade away.
A charity said the findings were a “significant step forward”.
In 2006, a research team at the University of Birmingham showed that ecstasy and anti-depressants such as Prozac had the potential to stop cancers growing.
The problem was that it needed doses so high they would have been fatal if given to people.
The researchers, in collaboration with the University of Western Australia, have chemically re-engineered ecstasy by taking some atoms away and putting new ones in…
A Cancer Breakthrough
Photo: Dr. Carl June / Penn Medicine
Eryn Brown reports for the LA Times that in early results from a clinical trial, genetically engineered T cells eradicate leukemia cells and thrive. Two of three patients studied have been cancer-free for more than a year:
In a potential breakthrough in cancer research, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have genetically engineered patients’ T cells — a type of white blood cell — to attack cancer cells in advanced cases of a common type of leukemia.
Two of the three patients who received doses of the designer T cells in a clinical trial have remained cancer-free for more than a year, the researchers said.
Experts not connected with the trial said the feat was important because it suggested that T cells could be tweaked to kill a range of cancers, including ones of the blood, breast and colon.
“This is a huge accomplishment — huge,” said Dr. Lee…
If Exercise Were A Cancer Drug, It Would Be A Blockbuster
But we all know that Big Pharma won’t let doctors prescribe exercise for their very profitable customers patients. Report from Medical News Today:
If exercise were a cancer drug, it would be a blockbuster, appears to be the conclusion of a new review on the benefits of physical activity to people surviving and living beyond cancer. In a report released today, 8 August, the leading UK charity Macmillan Cancer Support, firmly sweeps aside the tradition that cancer patients should “rest up” and “take it easy”, and urges doctors and nurses to prescribe physical activity to patients “at all stages of cancer from initial diagnosis through to the later stages”. However, despite the emergence of this evidence, many health professionals are failing to tell their cancer patients about the benefits of exercise, they added.
Ciaran Devane, Chief Executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, told the press that the evidence in the report, whose short title…
The Roads In North Dakota Are Giving People Cancer
What do you do when you find out the roads in your town are giving you and your children cancer? Via io9:
In Dunn County, North Dakota, the roads can kill you. In fact, anything you do to disturb rocks in the area, like driving or even sweeping, can kick up naturally-occurring particles that lodge in your body and give you a rare kind of lung cancer up to 30 years later. Dunn County, you see, is home to a lot of rocks containing erionite, an asbestos-like substance that’s highly toxic. Unfortunately, nobody knew that until very recently. And so at least 300 miles of roads in North Dakota are paved with the stuff.
What do you do when you discover that you’ve built your county’s infrastructure out of poison rocks?
So far, nothing is being done. This week, a group of researchers published an article about the problem in Proceedings of the…
42% of Britons Will Get Cancer, Statistics Show
There’s something wrong with our civilization when you have a better (worse?) than 40% chance of getting cancer in your lifetime. Denis Campbell writes in Guardian:
It was one of the starkest statistics about the nation’s health — that one in three of us would get cancer. Sadly, the figures have just got worse. Cancer experts now believe 42% of Britons will get the disease.
Macmillan Cancer Support has revised the figure after its researchers analysed official data covering diagnosis of cancer, death from the disease and overall mortality. Of the 585,000 people who died in the UK in 2008, 246,000 of them — 42% — had been diagnosed with cancer at some point.
The one in three figure has been used by cancer experts, campaigners and ministers for a decade. It is based on the fact that research into every death in the UK in 1999 showed that 220,000 people — some 35% of the 630,000 total deaths — had previously been found to have the disease.
Styrene Plates, Cups Found To Cause Cancer
Styrene 3D Balls
The only surprise here is that after years of delaying tactics by the plastics and chemical industries, the U.S. Government finally decided to tell its citizens that two very common compounds – styrene and formaldehyde – are carginogens. Rob Stein reports for the Washington Post:
Styrene, which is used to make those ubiquitous white foam coffee cups, food containers and many other products, is probably a human carcinogen, the federal government declared Friday.
The declaration came in the government’s latest update of its official list of known or possible carcinogens. It categorized formaldehyde, a chemical widely used to make many products, and a family of substances found in some herbal remedies as known carcinogens.
Officials stressed that the listings do not mean that any exposure to the substances will cause cancer. Instead, it means that the latest scientific evidence indicates that the agents can cause cancer in some people exposed to…
Waxy Monkey Frog Skin Could Treat Cancer
Photo: Alexander Maier (CC)
Belfast Telegraph reports:
A little-known frog from South America could hold the key to lifesaving treatments for up to 70 devastating medical conditions, Northern Ireland researchers have found.
Scientists from Queen’s University in Belfast have discovered the poetically-named Waxy Monkey Frog could be used in the fight against cancer.
They also found that the Giant Fire-bellied Toad, native to China and Vietnam, has the potential to treat an array of diseases including diabetes and stroke.
It will bring hope to the 8,500 people in Northern Ireland diagnosed with cancer each year and more than 3,500 people here who are told each year they have diabetes.
The Queen’s boffins stumbled upon the amazing breakthrough – which could revolutionise the treatment of billions of patients around the globe – purely by accident.
[Continues at Belfast Telegraph]
Tobacco Smoke Promoted As Cancer Cure In Indonesia
Photo: Andrew Magill (CC)
Agence France-Presse via the Raw Story reports:
An Indonesian woman exhales cigarette smoke into the mouth of a gaunt, naked patient at a Jakarta clinic, where tobacco is openly touted as a cancer cure.
The Western patient is suffering from emphysema, a condition she developed from decades of smoking. Along with cancer and autism, it’s just one of the ailments the Griya Balur clinic claims it can cure with cigarettes.
“I missed this,” says the woman, a regular customer, with an American accent, as Phil Collins?s “I Can Feel It” blares in the background.
Griya Balur would be shut down in many parts of the world, but not in Indonesia, one of the developing-country new frontiers for big tobacco as it seeks to replace its dwindling profits in the health-conscious West.
Long traditions of tobacco use combined with poor regulation and the billions of dollars that flow into government coffers from the tobacco…
Too Much Alcohol May Cause Cancer
Photo: André Karwath aka Aka (CC)
Just when you thought that drinking a few glasses of red wine every day was going to prolong your life comes this report in the British Medical Journal that it raises the risk of cancer. From AFP:
About one in 10 cancers in men and one in 33 in women in western European countries are caused by current and past alcohol consumption, according to a study released on Friday.
For some types of cancer, the rates are significantly higher, it said.
In 2008, for men, 44, 25 and 33 percent of upper digestive track, liver and colon cancers respectively were caused by alcohol in six of the countries examined, the study found.
The countries were Britain, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany and Denmark.
The study also showed that half of these cancer cases occurred in men who drank more than a recommended daily limit of 24 grammes of alcohol, roughly two…
Will You Drink Fukushima Milk?
Photo: FiveRings (CC)
How do you feel about drinking milk with trace radiation from Fukushima’s nuclear disaster, even if our government assures us there’s no health hazard? From US News:
In an update to its ongoing radiation monitoring following the Fukushima Daiichi reactor crisis in Japan, U.S. government officials announced late Wednesday that milk sampled March 25 in Washington state contained low levels of radiation not likely to cause harm to humans.
In a statement released jointly by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, the two agencies said that their screening of milk from Spokane, Wash., showed levels of iodine-131 that were “more than 5,000 times lower than the Derived Intervention Level” set by the FDA.
The level of iodine-131 found in the Spokane milk is “far below levels of public health concern, including for infants and children,” the FDA and the EPA both said. The agencies also noted…
Cancer Cells Are ‘Living Fossils’ Of Our Evolutionary Ancestors
Alasdair Wilkins reports for io9:
Cancer is one of the most difficult foes medical science has ever faced, but a controversial new idea might just show a way to victory. A group of scientists have evidence that cancer might be an evolutionary throwback to our most distant animal ancestor.
Astrobiologists Charles Lineweaver of the Australian National University and Paul Davies of Arizona State have proposed that cancerous cells are a so-called “living fossil”, the last remnant of a crucial evolutionary juncture some 600 million years ago. It’s been proposed before that cancer dates back to the beginning of multi-cellular animals, an evolutionary innovation that required cells to stop replicating whenever they wanted and start coordinating with the rest of the organism.
Cancer is what happens when these very ancient controls on cell replication break down, causing runaway cellular replication. But here’s where Lineweaver and Davies take the idea a step further – they suggest cancer actually is our earliest animal ancestor. They suggest these organisms were the first to figure out some measure of control over cell replication, but they lacked more precise control over cell growth.
This hypothesis, they argue, fits known tumor behavior better than the view that all cancer cells act independently. They point to angiogenesis, in which cancer cells built blood vessel networks to bring nutrients into the tumor, which suggests cooperation amongst the cells…
French Doctors Announced Lung Cancer ‘Breakthrough’
This may be a breakthrough in the treatment of lung cancer, but it doesn’t mean you should pick up smoking just yet. BBC reports:
French doctors say they have made a significant breakthrough in the treatment of lung cancer.
A medical team at Bobigny hospital in Paris removed a patient’s cancerous growth, and then gave him an artificial airway, or bronchus.
The bronchus was made from reconstituted aorta, the body’s largest artery.
The pioneering treatment in October 2009 avoided the complete removal of the patient’s lung.
In the later stages of lung cancer, only a third of patients survive a year.
The Paris patient, 78, is said be fit and well, some 16 months after surgery.
[Continues at BBC]
Japanese Dog Sniffs Out Early Bowel Cancer
Labrador retrievers are known to be trained for many things. They can work as seeing-eye dogs, therapy dogs, sniff for drugs, sniff for bombs, and now, sniff bowel cancer? BBC News reports:
A Labrador retriever has sniffed out bowel cancer in breath and stool samples during a study in Japan.
The research, in the journal Gut, showed the dog was able to identify early stages of the disease.
It has already been suggested that dogs can use their noses to detect skin, bladder, lung, ovarian and breast cancers.
Cancer Research UK said it would be extremely difficult to use dogs for routine cancer testing.
The biology of a tumour is thought to include a distinct smell and a series of studies have used dogs to try to detect it.
[Continues at BBC News]
