Brazil’s cancer curse

This sounds exactly like every quack scam out there. The mean old medical authorities are ignoring me! They must be jealous. Yeah, that's it.

What's the name of the drug? (My Portuguese is non-existent)

With at least 10,000 people he must be sitting on an amazing pile of data. Has he published it? If not, why not? If the patients aren't being tracked to check their progress, or at least their identity to find when they die, then his efforts are kind of wasted because nobody will trust anecdotes.

From the article:

> A fosfoetanolamina, atualmente, possui dados experimentais concluídas de fase I, II e III.

The problem with the press coverage is that it has too few information. In this case it sounds too good to be true. Usually the drug is useful against some kind of cancers, but not against others. (For example, useful against fast growing cancers, but not useful against slow growing cancers.) I want a link to the a fase III study to see the relevant information.

Most press coverage have a few success stories, for example someone that had a 20% reduction of the cancer in the last months. (Usually it's a measurement problem, they take two images with slightly different methods, and the second image look smaller.) It's extremely suspicious that this article doesn't even have one of this anecdotes.

On a completely unrelated note, I just moved to São Carlos, and am looking to connect with the tech community here. Could you contact me via the email in my profile, and we could talk further?

Here is his resume including links to published scientific papers: http://buscatextual.cnpq.br/buscatextual/visualizacv.do?id=K...

It's more likely the P53 mutation came from a Founder (individual who had the mutation quite some time ago) that passed it on to many individuals. Whether that original mutation was caused by a higher than average level of ionizing radiation is entirely speculative. This does not rule out increased cancer rates due to unrepaired ionizing radiation damage that went unrepaired to mutant P53, although that is also pretty speculative (I mean, it's a known fact that happens, but it's also not particularly necessary to explain the observations here).

The part about cancer risk models and geomagnetic fields and space exploration are a tangent, and not even a relevant or scientifically plausible one.

SAA = South Atlantic Anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_Anomaly I'd never heard of it before

What does SAA mean? All I get from google is South African Airways...

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA -- please define your acronyms) was also the focus of the high altitude ("space bomb") nuclear explosion tests of Operation Argus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Argus

a series of United States nuclear weapons tests and missile tests secretly conducted during August and September 1958 over the South Atlantic Ocean. They were performed by the Defense Nuclear Agency, in conjunction with the Explorer 4 space mission....

The tests were proposed by Nicholas Christofilos of what was then the Livermore branch of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) as a means to verify the Christofilos effect, which argued that high-altitude nuclear detonations would create a radiation belt in the extreme upper regions of the Earth's atmosphere. Such belts would be similar in effect to the Van Allen radiation belts. Such radiation belts were viewed as having possible tactical use in war. Prior to Argus, Hardtack Teak had shown disruption of radio communications from a nuclear blast, though this was not due to the creation of radiation belts....

Due to the South Atlantic Anomaly, the Van Allen radiation belt is closer to the Earth's surface at that location. The (extreme) altitude of the tests was chosen so as to prevent personnel involved in the test from being exposed to any ionizing radiation.

This and other space-based testing destroyed several satellites, including the first communications satellite, Telstar, which failed after only seven months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar

A memo concerning the failure of a British satellite, Ariel-1, recently surfaced and was reported by the BBC:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150910-the-nuke-that-fried...

The article mentions that this isn't happening here and that's the problem. It's not so severe that families die off but is severe enough to cause a lot of ongoing casualties.