Scientists suggest that cancer is purely man-made

[tabatha]

Cancer is a modern, man-made disease caused by environmental factors such as pollution and diet, a study by University of Manchester scientists has strongly suggested.

The study of remains and literature from ancient Egypt and Greece and earlier periods – carried out at Manchester’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology and published in Nature – includes the first histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy.

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.

Professor Rosalie David, at the Faculty of Life Sciences, said: “In industrialised societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare. There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.”

She added: “The important thing about our study is that it gives a historical perspective to this disease. We can make very clear statements on the cancer rates in societies because we have a full overview. We have looked at millennia, not one hundred years, and have masses of data.”

http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/news/display/?id=6243

[Crazy Dave]

1. Makes sense to me

30 years ago I used to know someone who knew someone that had cancer or had a family member with it. These days just guessing I personally know about two dozen people who have had cancer treatment and every year at least one person I know or someone in their family gets diagnosed with some form of it.

[tabatha]

2. The same for me.

[HuckleB]

8. You are 30 years older.

Cancer incidence by age - UK statistics
http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/incidence/age/

[Crazy Dave]

26. 30 years ago I knew more people than I know today...

...and many were 20 - 30 years older than me or more and it was rare to hear someone say they knew someone who had cancer.

So what would my age have to do with someone else's disease?

It's increased, like how many people I know without jobs to at least two out of ten that I see or hear from regularly. I've had two bosses in the past 15 years die of different types of cancer. What are the odds of that?

[Name removed]

29. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[HuckleB]

43. What would your anecdote have to do with the population as a whole?

:shrug:

[Crazy Dave]

44. You're the one who made the "You are 30 years older" claim, not me

I can't defend or explain your stupidity, just keep pointing it out and keep playing you like a yo-yo :P

[HuckleB]

45. And I backed it up with data.

You then followed with more unproven anecdotes.

Try again.

[Crazy Dave]

46. And you keep replying with unproven accusations and speculations

Your turn :P

[HuckleB]

47. What are these supposed unproven accusations and speculations?

BTW, I'm still waiting for you to answer the question about what your anecdote has to do with the population as a whole.

PS:

Figure 1. Cancer incidence rate by age group, all sites combined, both sexes (rate per 100,000 population)
http://www.nia.nih.gov/ResearchInformation/ConferencesAndMeetings/WorkshopReport/Figure1.htm

[Crazy Dave]

48. I would agree that cancer risks increase with age but...

...not everybody is the same age...duh!

BTW, you've proved to all of us that you own a dictionary but please turn past the letter "A"

If I see the word "anecdote" again I'm gonna puke :puke:

Hey...your mommy is calling you

[HuckleB]

49. And now you go back to the confessional.

I'm sorry to make you look up a few words.

Oh, and I call an anecdote an anecdote. I'm sorry that bothers you.

Bye.

[Crazy Dave]

50. I own you and you ain't going anywhere little boy

You sure you don't want to take me up on that $100?

[uppityperson]

52. Do you still know people who are 20-30 yrs older than you?People are more open now also about cancer

used to be you hid the fact of breast cancer, or rectal cancer, or many other kinds. I knew an older person who died of the type of skin cancer that is very easily removable and doesn't metastisize. Person hid it from everyone until it became obvious they had a large smelling rotting pit in their side.

What your age has to do with it is those people who are 20-30 yrs older than you are still older and more likely to have cancer.

[LeftishBrit]

39. Also, nowadays people are more open about cancer.

In the past, perhaps because there were fewer methods of treatment, and cancer was seen much more as a death sentence than now, people often avoided speaking of cancer; and doctors often avoided telling patients of their diagnosis. Obituaries simply stated that people had 'died after a long illness'.

I was just reading a biography of the 19th-century writer Edmund Gosse. His mother died of cancer when he was a child in the 1850s. Even many years later when he wrote his autobiography, he wrote about his mother's death, but could not bring himself to name the disease that killed her.

Nowadays, people are far more ready to speak about the disease - something that has really changed in the last 30 or 40 years. So one will be more *aware* that a friend is not just 'ill' but has cancer.

[Crazy Dave]

41. Another possibility could be that more people could afford health care back then...

...and maybe caught it earlier than they do now even though we have better technology. Most of the time back in those days I never had insurance but a visit to a clinic was only $25 or so. Up until '98 it used to only cost me $27 a week to insure my whole family so we had checkups regularly.

All I know is what I see and here. Too many people that I know personally have have had treatments, died or one lady I know has just gone through her third round of surgery and treatments over the past 10 years.

[HuckleB]

42. Absolutely. -eom-

[Xipe Totec]

3. Statistical analysis on censored data is risky

Lifetime data are often censored; you do not know the exact lifetime, only that it's longer than a given value. Sometimes "dead from other causes" is considered a censoring event for the mortality of a given disease, and in those cases it is particularly important to ensure that these other causes are unassociated with the diseased state.

It is an error to ignore censoring in the statistical analysis, sometimes with extreme consequences.

- excerpts from Peter Dalgaard,
Introductory Statistics with R,
Survival Analysis

[Raschel]

4. Maybe chemicals, but there are people who have terrible diets who don't get cancer.

[The Backlash Cometh]

5. So, natural food were always better for you?

[LaurenG]

6. I doubt this

First how would they know who died of cancer or had cancer and died of a heart attack when there was no way to diagnose that disease accurately in people who were not mummified? The fact they are basing this on the mummy's they have is also very unscientific. I would hope it was true and that we have found a way to prevent it but my gut says they are mistaken, big time. They haven't presented enough evidence to convince me.

edit typo

[eShirl]

7. "There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer."

I find that statement hard to believe.

[BootinUp]

14. One that immediately comes to mind is radon gas.

I am fairly sure there are others.

[unblock]

19. tobacco, hello? coal, hello? anything radioactive, hello?

[BootinUp]

21. I was going to say soot from any man made fires

but those are well... man made.

[unblock]

25. fires happen without the aid of man -- just add lightning

[Liberal Veteran]

32. Although I expect living near a volcano might qualify as well.

[Liberal Veteran]

31. Add asbestos to that as well and even sunlight!

Gosh, if only we had never created sunlight, people would never have gotten melanoma.

[hedgehog]

33. But is melanoma a single cause disease (too much sunlight)

or is it a case of 1- 2- 3; sunlight + vitamin D deficiency + virus(?) + whatever. Toss in that we've been wearing clothes only relatively recently genetically speaking. On top of everything else, have we altered the atmosphere to change the spectrum we're exposed to? Sounds silly, but we did quite a job on the ozone layer before we even knew it was there.

[uppityperson]

53. sunlight

[HuckleB]

9. Considering life expectancy at the time, as well as the data issues brought to light above...

...I'm not sure how they come to make this asserrtion.

Cancer incidence by age - UK statistics
http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/incidence/age/

[tabatha]

12. Toxins accumulate with age.

Older cells probably have more RNA/DNA damage, hence it makes sense that older people would have more cancer, if cancer was caused by bad diet and environmental factors.

[HuckleB]

16. There is likely no single cause, and there are many kinds of cancers, with varying causes.

[tabatha]

17. Regardless of the various causes

the health of one's cells is critical in succumbing or not.

[Raschel]

18. Very good answer. This is the reason for targeted treatments.

There may be no cure but the treatments are becoming more refined, individualized.

[BootinUp]

15. bingo. nt

[struggle4progress]

10. (1) "Cancer" is not a single disease but many different diseases

(2) Some viruses are known to cause tumors
(3) The actual development of a cancer may require several different steps over many years, so people with precancerous conditions can and do die of other causes
(4) Cancers may have an effect on general health, so people with cancers can and do die of other causes

[enough]

11. Back in the 60's and 70's, there was much discussion of man-made carcinogens.

That seemed to change over the next decades, when the emphasis was on blaming the victim for bad living (including stress).

[CatsDogsBabies]

13. Nothing in the natural environment that causes cancer???

That seems unlikely. What about something like radon? Is this natural?

I know that breast cancer has been around for quite a while. I think it was one of the first known cancers since it was more obvious than other types of cancers. Certainly there has been an increase in many cancers. I think there are pretty direct links between things like smoking and lung cancer.

And, just think how many people died early of other things, like infection, thousands of years ago.

[LeftishBrit]

20. Cancer is a disease of older people.

Few people in ancient times lived long enough to reach the age when cancer is common.

There may be a number of other explanations. For example, it may be that certain childhood illnesses or prenatal adversities increase the risk of cancer later in life - and that in the days of the ancient Egyptians, such factors were likely to result in death at birth or in early childhood, so that such individuals never lived to develop cancer.

Certainly, there are environmental factors operating now that can cause cancer, that were not factors in ancient Egypt. For example, ancient Egyptians didn't smoke, nor were they exposed to pollution from heavy industry. But it's a bit of a leap to assume that cancer is PURELY due to man-made environmental factors (as opposed to partly so, which it undoubtedly is).

It should be noted that Rosalie David is an Egyptologist, not a medical scientist, so that she is an expert on life in ancient Egypt and the study of mummies, but not necessarily on the full medical implications of the studies.

[hedgehog]

34. IIRC, lung cancer was considered a rare disease around 1900,

despite all the exposure to pollution from burning coal. It was only around 1930 that enough people had been smoking long enough to make lung cancer a common disease.

I don't know for certain, but I think the term cancer as in the astrological sign Cancer the crab has been applied since ancient times. That suggests that the disease was known back then.

[Codeine]

54. There's no relation between the two, at least not in the fashion that your

statement might suggest. The Greek word for crab ("Karkinos", well, that's the transliterated term at least) came first, then early physicians (such as they were) began to refer to malignannt tumors by the same name because they considered them to have a similar appearance. Tumors in general were called "oncos" (swelling); that's from where the term oncology derives.

[pansypoo53219]

22. people didn't live as long to get cancer too.

who needs cancer when the plaque and childhood diseases are and efficient population control. i swear war resurfaces to keep humans in check.

[ellenfl]

23. i've been saying this for years. we're killing ourselves with

chemicals. poo-poo it all you want (those who do) but can you honestly say that the chemicals we ingest don't have an affect?

ellen fl

[trotsky]

27. Even if that's true...

some of those same "chemicals" allow us to live pretty active and full lives well into our 70s and 80s, which was also pretty damn rare in ancient times.

[ellenfl]

35. you cannot tell me that the chemicals in a whopper are

good for me. in addition to preservatives, you also have to look at the sugar and sodium in our processeed foods. they can be killers too.

ellen fl

[trotsky]

38. I'm not telling you that. That would be a strawman argument of your own creation.

I'm just trying to get you to see the world in shades other than black & white.

[SheilaT]

24. The problem with this statement

is that there just aren't a lot of bodies from earlier eras that are still in good enough condition to do autopsies of. Sometimes you'll read in some biography, an attempt to diagnose over time what illness or disease some historical figure had. Given that there wasn't even any aspirin around more than a hundred or so years ago, and good, accurate descriptions of symptoms are not that common from hundreds, let alone thousands of years ago, so that doctors in the past really didn't understand what people had or what they were dying of for the most part, I am not impressed with the idea that cancer is a purely modern disease.

[trotsky]

28. Statement? Heck the whole article makes me cringe.

You are right, we just don't have the sample size necessary to make ridiculous statements like "this PROVES cancer was rare".

[Liberal Veteran]

30. HPV is man-made?

Well, that's good to know.

[Odin2005]

36. What a bunch of BULLSHIT

[Liberal Veteran]

37. Succinct.

I find it highly unlikely there would be a large record of cancer considering the diagnostic tools required to say Jebediah Von Peasant died of leukemia in 1326 CE didn't really exist.

How would we know if there was a high incidence of pancreatic cancer in Batavaria circa 967 CE?

I think there is a problem applying modern medical thinking to a non-modern society.

For the most part, the average person 500 or 600 years ago who developed a malignancy would never have gotten a diagnosis. Grandpa felt tired all the time and complained of pain, lost weight and passed on. Could have been diabetes, cancer, sepsis, anemia or a hundred other things.

Medical treatment (excluding injury) was focused almost entirely on palliative care and identifying communicable diseases. A lot of the time, the closest anyone got to a doctor was the village shaman or its equivalent, if that.

It seems like it would extremely difficult to reconstruct the incidence of cancer in anything other than the last 100 years or so.

[semillama]

40. Your post sums it up. Strange the article authors didn't consider it. n/t

[DavidDvorkin]

51. Therefore skin cancer is an illusion.

[HuckleB]

55. Not exactly...

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/10/20/is_cancer_a_disease_of_the_modern_world.php#comments

[Naturyl]

56. See my post about sunlight for another view of why this is the case

Or, if you don't want to be bothered, the gist is that cancer may also have a lot to do with lack of adequate Vitamin D caused by indoor lifestyles and the sunscreen scare.