Bladder cancer 'attacked and killed by common cold virus'
bbc.com
bbc.com
I don't know. I've noticed that if I take zinc pills along with vitamin C pills on the first or second day of the cold I start feeling better within two or three days and within a week the cold is almost gone. If I do not then the cold can easily last a couple of weeks.
There are hundreds of variants of the common cold virus, and you are at any time more or less immune to a subset of them, so many times after you're exposed you just feel ill for half a day. If you pair one of those occurances with your magic pill intake, you'll truly believe the pill caused you to get better, and then you'll keep buying that pill every time you feel a cold coming up for the rest of your life.
A real medical study is 10,000-100,000 patients, it's not possible to draw any conclusions from a single human's observation in this regard... but people keep trying, it's due to the nature of the human mind and its analysis of causality :)
Colds last a week. That’s normal.
Those supplements work, they changed life of my entire family. I personally find it ridiculous for people to object. Yes, some may not get full blown effect just like with anything but in majority of cases they work. Personally, they changed my life and I didn't measure on a one year sample.
(Perhaps all their recorded history was digital or otherwise ephemeral so we cant find it, assuming history repeats itself)
Even worse, both of these ideas, while obvious "crackpot" territory, are much more believable and less fantastical than the claims of most of our current religions, which most people in the world still believe. So as long as we continue to respect peoples' religious beliefs, I have a hard time with dismissing these ancient aliens/advanced civilizations claims out-of-hand.
First, if you have the ability to engineer a bioweapon like this and spread it around to eliminate cancer in humans, why wouldn't you just genetically engineer the humans to not have cancer (i.e., just bake the ability into people, instead of having an airborne agent which will have much less efficacy since not everyone will catch it)? And secondly, why would you want to give people the suffering that comes with colds?
So, that leaves 2 possibilities: 1) Cold viruses were engineered, but they evolved to their present state where they're actually a big nuisance rather than a big help, or
2) Cold viruses were just a natural evolutionary outcome.
Either way involves cold viruses getting to their present state through evolution (both ways being undesirable to humans), not engineering, and #2 satisfies Occam's Razor better because of what I wrote at the top (i.e., engineering contagious viruses to fix a problem in human biology is a Rube Goldberg-esque solution).
I guess if you really want to get wacky, you could postulate that in this ancient society, they had some sort of religion or philosophy that humans shouldn't be biologically "tampered with", so either most people or at least the authorities would have rejected a straightforward medical solution, so some rogue person or group came up with the virus scheme (somewhat similar to how we can't get everyone to actually update their software to fix security vulnerabilities).
My point was that if getting a cold made a significant difference in the likelihood of some cancer then you may be substantially undercounting the risk of that cancer to children in the counterfactual where there is no susceptibility to colds.
(To be clear, I don't think the parent's speculation is likely accurate. I do think it's interesting.)
Do kids (and people in general) get substantially less colds in warmer climates? Because then we can check cancer rates there. (And spend a lot of effort on controlling for other differences.)
I wonder if anyone did this kind of data fishing.
Yeah, there's some tension between risk of being seen as condescending and making sure everything is sufficiently clear. In a low-stakes context like this (and outside of clarifications or responses to ELI5 requests) I try not to fill in all the gaps - when it goes well it leaves us all feeling a little smarter and when it goes wrong it occasionally leads somewhere interesting. The increased risk of misinterpretation was made even worse here by the priming of several other people making the point I wasn't.
Flu are truly scary causing deaths throughout childhood with increased survival around two years and then again around five years. My youngest turns five this month. Before she was two she was hospitalized with croup and she has had a rougher ride with illness than my other kids along the way too.
Other special populations of children include those with AIDS, CF, DM, and any other immunocompromising condition or respiratory anomaly.
Having addressed the special populations that are implicitly not the targets of broad comments:
Typical children tolerate colds just fine. It’s not the flu.
(Croup is also not a cold.)
I appreciate you being complete here, though your opening also reads like you are doubling down on your previous response.
Your comment about croup is also bizarre, as the paragraph I included mention of it in is not about colds. Context matters.
Evolution started without any of those.
Your reply fails to acknowledge it.
Your comment seems, by implication, to make a similar mistake: it doesn't matter much how long we were in a different situation - what matters is whether we've had enough of a chance to adapt to the new one. It doesn't take (k)X years to "undo" adaptations that took X years to find.
And yes, the 100 years you give are clearly not enough generations to do much adapting. Some of the items mentioned in the earlier comment (clothes, fire, shelter) are things humans have had for substantially longer than 100 years. But I don't know enough about the relevant time scales for anything to be clear to me about how much we've probably adapted to having them, which is why I didn't speak to that.
My view is that the past century or so may be an increased period of both driftband (through geographic contact) remixing, possibly to be followed by a selection process, whether by civilisation collapse, singularity, or other mechanisms.
In particular, it seems that the dramatic reductions of, e.g., early childhood mortality, represent the lifting of an immense amount of selection. To what end becomes an interesting quesstion.
Similarly how we have the surplus resources to keep people alive and well (and thus productive) with seriously adaptive-maladaptive trait groups, eg. Stephen Hawking and other famous physicists of the 20th century. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
70 is easily a cancer age. Going by the current research at https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/02/04/why-are-... one can expect 3/4 people over 60 to have cancer. And it's increasing.
So yeah the not living long enough doesn't really hold water. Also juvenile cancers weren't really a thing at all until the modern world (more likely bacterial infections until we discovered penicillin were more likely for juvenile deaths).
Depends on what we consider "modern". Last I checked, they found cancers on dinosaur fossils. see e.g. https://www.cancerquest.org/cancer-biology/cancer-wild-anima...
As for humans, it is documented back in the ancient Egypt, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cancer
The hunter gathers tribes we all encounter have very low (if non existent) rates of cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other western diseases. Once they start consuming a modern diet of flour, sugar etc these diseases are now at extremely high rates. You can see this in the aborigines of Australia for example. The inuit of Canada, and so forth.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of...
Your links about dinosaur cancers said they found cancers only one type of dinosaur. I would say that's a genetic thing more than an environmental. Then the other animal cancers mentioned underneath seem to have a human component involved.
I would say that further supports the theory.
When someone posts obvious misinformation he's downvoted to oblivion fairly quickly, and when someone makes an honest mistake he's corrected by people who know better and hopefully update his views adequately.
My hopeful attitude is that none of us are so fragile and gratuitously impressionable that this would be dangerous.
My further hope is that anyone that might be so impacted would incorporate the digestion and (eventual) repudiation of this information as part of their intellectual maturation process.
My final hope is that we all learn how dangerous and stifling it is to hand over defining and legitemising "truth" to others. You need to learn and grow as an intellectual being and that doesn't come in a hothouse protected from all perturbations.
My understanding is that mouth and throat cancers are realy uncommon before middle age, so the moderate but ubiquitous fitness loss from the cold is probably worse, evolutionarily speaking, than the substantial but infrequent fitness loss from dying of cancer later in life.
It seems plausible, however, that the mutations which make cells cancerous might also impair their response to viral infection.
/armchair
In general you'd think that viruses are good to avoid if you don't want cancer. Once they invade a cell they're basically just bits of RNA floating around waiting to fuck up your DNA.
A more likely outcome will be in 10,20,30 years there is an increase or decrease in some disease and it is linked to getting the vaccine for X.
And to make it even more complicated different genetic groups might respond differently since they have different resistances to certain viruses.
Why do you think the strongest of the strong bacteria are found in hospitals? Because they do a lot of cleaning and disinfecting. The weak are purged, the few who remain don't have to compete with the weak on other axes, thus they can concentrate on developing resistance.
In your home, where you don't clean as strongly and as frequently, there is a wide variety of bacteria who compete against each other, and can't spend too much on developing resistance.
In contrast, disinfectants might make a bacteria population stronger over time, but as you said, individual weaker bacteria die off (darwinism).
(Edited after 8 minutes to clarify.)
I presume you mean strong against antibiotics and sterilisation. The evolved bacteria are likely weaker along other dimensions (that are less important for survival in a hospital setting). Some evolution is compromises, improving X has cost Y.
Aside: the mega-plate video is an unbelievably good demonstration of bacterial evolution: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=plVk4NVIUh8 especially note the tree at the end showing how many different mutations evolved.
The only thing I’m familiar with is using BCG vaccine vs. Superficial bladder cancer. And that is an immuno therapy. A PTEN mutation allows mycobacterium to enter cancer cells preferentially, and then invites an immune response that the cancer cells themselves had evaded. PTEN is a common mutation and bladder cancer, but is not seen in healthy bladder urothelium.
Edit: I should have read the article before commenting. The virus in the article also does not attack the bladder cancer, it has exactly the same mechanism as BCG. Although hopefully it is reliant on a different targeting mechanism than the PTEN mutation.
People who say they "never get sick" are often "sick" but don't know it.
Or maybe they don't have children.
Oh common. That's just pure bullshit.
This is basically form of immunotherapy - most important thing for cancer is to evade immune system. Anything that triggers it in vacinity can have cleaning effect. In Japan you can get colly vaccine for example (intentional bacterial infection). In history, there are number of example of remissions after serious infective disease (in this case not so serious).
Its so obvious that it hurts me that people fail to see it. What is not obvious is what agent will do this.
It also makes one wonder weather certain vaccines actually promote cancer given that those vaccinated quickly clear future disease so infective agent doesn't have time any more to trigger the appropriate immune response (I am not in antivac camp, this is only logical)
In this study, 15 patients with the disease were given the cancer-killing coxsackievirus (CVA21) through a catheter one week before surgery to remove their tumours.