Air pollution cancer breakthrough will rewrite the rules | Hacker News Reader

Air pollution cancer breakthrough will rewrite the rules

bbc.com

196 pointsvba65 comments

> 99% of people in the world live in places where air pollution exceeds the WHO guidelines

Wow. I knew cities are polluted but this is extreme. In 50 years we might look at pollution as we look at smoking now, a terrible self-inflicted wound on civilization that took way too long to acknowledge and fix.

Don't forget the fraud of the whole Dieselgate scandal.

We were all getting excess NO2 pumped out of diesel engines. Effectively shortening all our lifespans.

In the US there are glider kits that let old Diesel engines belch forever on highways legally.

https://www.csmtruck.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-glider-kit-tru...

https://www.fitzgeraldgliderkits.com/what-is-a-glider-kit/

This a very generic statement that IMHO does not point us in the right direction: NO2 concentration can be linked to a statistically lower lifespan. But it will affect vulnerable people over proportionally (so it does not decrease all of our lifespans) and it is also an effective statical proxy for other traffic pollution. (Also with rigged diesels concentration has been going down and life expectancy is increasing also for other reasons)

Unlike toxic stuff in food, regulations do not try to limit the exposure of an individual but to take action based and prioritize measures based on the statistical severity to the whole population. I do not really think that Dieselgate (while being deeply unethical many ppl kind of knew that the regulation had holes like a cheese) really made that much of a difference if you look at the situation globally. Access to clean air and water is a privilege and all rich nations and their citizens have a responsibility. It is far to easy to always just point at some rigged exhaust cleaning systems in cars. The problem is far more complex (also electric cars will produce emissions)

Just came back from a trip to Albania and let me tell you those NOX are still getting pumped in the air there and will be for quite some time given that "sell it to someone somewhere else" is our go-to "solution" for owning a pollutant car:

> Albania is amongst the countries in Europe with the lowest number of new cars on the road, with just 0.6% under two years old

https://exit.al/en/2022/08/26/old-cars-dominate-albanian-roa...

This right there is why in my mind every single afflicted unit should have been recalled, replaced by VW and the others, and resale banned. We're letting others suffer and die for our unwillingness to hold our own elites responsible.

It’s difficult to judge this in a vacuum. On one hand, toxic emissions. On the other hand, someone who can drive to the hospital in an emergency.

Once every 10,000 trips, one drives to the hospital in an emergency.

Why would you judge in a vacuum? There's statistics, and traffic fatalities is (one of) the most dangerous thing (for young people). That's cars.

There's 112 and ambulanses if you need to a hospital urgently. Everyone doesn't need a spare "what if my neighbor gets a heart attack" rush to the hospital car at home

Diesel is a scandal many orders of magnitude bigger than asbestos and smoking, and we'll look back on it with that reverence.

That in the UK most diesel drivers remove their particulate filters to increase fuel efficiency (meaning that essentially every white van on the road is rolling coal like a Texan), makes it all the worse.

It's not even the lung damage, the brain damage that's been caused (there's ongoing research that may yet associate the spike in autism and neurodegenerative diseases in Europe with diesel exposure since it was incentivised) could be even more prevalent.

Margaret Heffernan did a willful blindness Ted Talk about this just about ten years ago that really rings true on this topic.

https://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_the_dangers_of_...

> in the UK most diesel drivers remove their particulate filters

Are you sure about that? Sound quite crazy to me.

> to increase fuel efficiency

How much would that save?

> Diesel is a scandal

Yes, what the car manufacturers did is horrible and it is also horrible that governments did not find it out or enforce it. An even bigger scandal is that UK diesel drivers remove their particulate filters to save a few bucks. How insane and selfish do you have to be to do that?

Also cost. It's about EUR200 to (illegally) remove it, and quite a bit more to change it every 100k or so (numbers are not exact, been a while since I researched).

This.

It can cost up to £2k to replace the filter if it fails on an expensive model, which happens quite regularly for less reliable models.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, diesel filters aren’t checked for at MOT and (as an example) it’s quite easy to buy a passing result as the garages responsible for servicing your car are the same one carrying out the test (and offer guaranteed pass packages so they would also bear the cost of putting anything right that failed - so they’re strongly incentivised to ignore problems).

That all said, testing wasn’t mandatory for most of Covid and emissions aren’t really tested properly even though they were supposed to be years ago (emissions tests won’t detect removed particulate filters if you don’t accelerate during the test, so the garage that just took a bribe to remove your filter can choose not to do that and wave you on through).

While Dieselgate was certainly a scandal, it was more significant as an example (now known to be one of many) of cheating than as an act of NOx pollution. The NOx standard for an average heavy-duty truck/bus allows (by my math) 3.8x more NOx per hour than VWs were emitting before the scandal and subsequent fixes. There are more heavy-duty trucks and busses (16 million) on the roads today in the USA than there were non-conforming TDI engines sold in the entire world (11 million), and the trucks run many more hours per day.

I'm not trying to diminish the severity of VW lying to the public, but we shouldn't hold Dieselgate up as a unique (or even particularly egregious) act of pollution.

The calculus may be different for Europe, but they still have 6 million trucks and busses on the roads.

I'm not defending the lying here, but ultimately the dieselgate scandal was triggered by too aggressive of regulations that exceeded the possible tech. Most companies decided to just pull diesel cars from the US market, and it turns out that all of the ones that stayed were tricking the tests in one way or another.

The diesels of that era that were having to trick the test, were also orders of magnitude cleaner than previous diesels, and modern diesel tech nowadays does meet those standards that they couldn't meet at the time. Moreover, the diesel trucks and buses are held to a different standard and pollute massively more than the dieselgate vehicles.

Ultimately diesel engines are much more efficient than gasoline engines, and massively reduce CO2 emissions... arguably the biggest health and existential threat humans face today. I think modern diesel/electric hybrids running clean burning renewable diesels probably have less environmental impact than any other type of vehicle on the road today. It's a shame that dieselgate ruined this for us, because it would probably be widespread if not.

For example, the VW XL1 was sold to the public getting 260mpg with ~2013 diesel tech- about twice the 'MPGe' of the most efficient production electric cars, and it can burn carbon neutral renewable diesels. Supposedly these produced 21 g/km of CO2, or about 1/6th of the effective CO2 emissions of EVs in the USA.

> Most companies decided to just pull diesel cars from the US market, and it turns out that all of the ones that stayed were tricking the tests in one way or another.

That's just not true. There were three options, stop selling diesels, implement a selective catalytic reduction system, cheat the test. All three were done.

> That's just not true. There were three options, stop selling diesels, implement a selective catalytic reduction system, cheat the test. All three were done.

What you are saying isn't accurate. A selective catalytic reduction system wasn't sufficient to pass the test without also cheating. Many of the affected VW cars did have selective catalytic reduction. Post lawsuit required fix these cars now use MASSIVE amounts of urea requiring constant refills, wear out the SCR components frequently on short intervals, and don't have nearly the performance they were designed to have. These companies were unable at the time to figure out how to get vehicles, even with SCR to have the performance and reliability buyers were expecting without also cheating on the tests. After the VW scandal, it was later found that BMW, Mercedes, Jaguar, Fiat Chrysler, Toyota, Nissan, and several other companies were all also cheating. I am not aware of a single diesel passenger vehicle sold in the ~2009-2016 time period in the USA that wasn't later found to be cheating on emissions tests.

> Production began by mid 2013 and was limited to 250 units.

> The Volkswagen XL1 plug-in diesel-electric hybrid was available only in Europe and its 5.5 kWh lithium-ion battery delivered an all-electric range of 50 km (31 mi)

Like bathrooms next to kitchens in roman plumbing, like lead pipes, like asbestos insulation, or like nonstick pans.

The course of history is full of misteps. Of course, an important distinction is that now we are all individually at varying ideological stages of incredulous reflection about these.

Why wait 50 years??

> In 50 years we might look at pollution as we look at smoking now, a terrible self-inflicted wound on civilization

I'm convinced in 500 years we'll look as today's civilization as barbarian.

Like drug addicts, we know we are poisoning ourselves and destroying the natural resources we depend on and we cannot stop.

Why wait? I see modern society as barbaric right now.

They probably mean that it becomes the mainstream/obvious view.

We take most of the society we live in for granted as the way things just are or should be.

It’s the suburbs too. Not hard to see why: we’ve reshaped our society around cars, and they’re spewing pollutants into the air everywhere.

EVs won’t necessarily improve this, by the way: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

> The outcome is critically dependent upon the extent of regenerative braking relative to use of friction brakes on the BEV, but overall there will be only modest changes to the total local emissions of particles from a passenger car built to current emissions standards.

This is why BEV adoption should result in a very large drop in cancer and other health problems.

EV drivers have told me after a bit of ownership, they see ICE cars as thoroughly filthy, loud, dirty, inefficient, and almost rude.

Our addiction to being able to drive places with but a mere tap of a gas pedal has blinded us to the devil's bargain of the ICE. I honestly think that a great deal of the instinctive hatred of cyclists is tied to how deeply the power and convenience and freedom of driving has ensconced itself into our subconscious.

We shall see, I guess.

Maybe, but this is about PM2.5 emissions, and EVs aren’t that much better in that regard:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

Don’t get me wrong, they are much better than ICEs in terms of total emissions, but not for this particular issue.

So... what are possible side effects of suppressing that signal? As I understand the article, one would have to do so long-term. I mean, is that signal really so useless? I would think it occurs for a reason?

My understanding is that sure, inflammation is a heavy weapon of the immune system that causes quite a bit collateral damage because it's more like a weapon of mass destruction instead of carefully targeted strikes. I would think it exists for a reason though, although frequently repeated use, again as I understand it, is not how it's supposed to work. Still, suppressing it entirely and long-term, what would that do?

There are a variety of inflammation pathways and signalling proteins. It's possible that IL-8beta has a uniquely high cancer inducing potential, and that when blocked, other signalling proteins can still generate appropriate inflammation for proper function.

But ya, long-term effects are going to have to be studied. Luckily, it looks like IL-8b inhibitors are used to treat other chronic diseases, so we can pull some data out of there (though a lot of them are auto-immune, so the validity of extrapolating to a more healthy population is maybe questionable).

It's also possible that we can develop a more precise approach that moderates the signalling response of IL-8beta without fully suppressing it.

Proponents of fasting will love this, since the idea is that not eating for a while will cause the body to scavenge for this old / damaged cell material.

And is that nonsense or is there evidence that backs it up?

FYI: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/fasting...

But as to the mechanism... not a scooby.

> Long periods of fasting between meals helped male mice live longer and healthier lives, regardless of the content of their diets. More studies are needed to confirm these results and understand how different fasting periods may impact health.

I am sure fasting proponents promise way too many things, but the underlying cell cleanup mechanism [0] is very real and received the Nobel Prize in 2016 [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autophagy

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27912049/

The wiki page does not mention fasting.

> fasting and CR [calorie restriction] are the most potent non-genetic autophagy stimulators, and lack the undesirable side effects associated with alternative interventions.

> We conclude that both fasting and CR have a role in the upregulation of autophagy, the evidence overwhelmingly suggesting that autophagy is induced in a wide variety of tissues and organs in response to food deprivation

From: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30172870/

I have multiple relatives who are aging researchers.

Fasting is healthy and normal. Many humans historically regularly "fasted" by today's standards just by going 12+ hours between modest meals.

We know that it slows signs of aging, but it can also depress the immune system (which might be why it slows aging), so it can still cause you to die young.

The effects of fasting on all-cause mortality are generally positive, but it's unclear right now whether that means people need to do uncomfortable levels of fasting or if most of us are just killing ourselves with eating too much and too often.

But here we want cells to eat themselves, not damaged organelles. I believe nuclear DNA isn't among the things cleaned up by autophagy.

> I believe nuclear DNA isn't among the things cleaned up by autophagy.

The ProNukes have gone too far this time.

Spermidine does this as well.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15548627.2018.1...

If you want to know how to increase it ask me how.

> Dietary spermidine is rapidly resorbed from the intestine and distributed in the body without degradation [37].

Not only by diet, we make spermidine endogenously.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Wesley-Brooks-2/publica...

B6 will increase ODC and AMD1 activity.

B2 for SMOX and PAO.

This will keep this pathyway functioning well.

> If you want to know how to increase it ask me how.

how?

Thanks for asking! The polyamines, including Spermidine, are created off of the urea cycle and increasing the urea cycle is dependent on lowering, or inhibiting Nitric Oxide Synthase. There are plenty of natural NOS inhibitors, like Black Tea and Ginger. This will mean instant of Arginine going to make Nitric Oxide it is instead shunted to the enzyme Arginase in the urea cycle. Arginase needs Manganese too increase function, so maybe mussels will help here since they are very high in manganese.

But we cannot stop here since this might just mean that you spin the urea cycle around and around. What we need to do is stimulate Orniothine Decarboxylase (ODC) to pull the ornithine out of the urea cycle to the polymaine pathway. ODC need B6 as a cofactor to increase activity so taking B6 or eating foods high in B6 will do well here.

Not that we have the ornithine going where it need we need to make sure we can turn it into spermidine by making sure we have enough of the coenzymes for those enzymes. The coenzyme here is SAMe.

And that's it. But be careful, because if you have messed up genetics like me you already make enough spermidine and it will cause great mental turmoil, even suicidal thoughts.

Here is the pathway: https://www.science.org/cms/10.1126/science.aan2788/asset/5e...

On mental illness and spermidine: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5293545/

"The idea of taking a cancer-blocking pill if you live in a heavily polluted area is not completely fanciful. " - Prof Charles Swanton

Really interesting and, obviously major news in the battle against cancer.

In terms of research funding; wonder if it will lead to industries linked with cancer, e.g. tobacco, alcohol, motor vehicles ... , quietly starting to fund prophylactic R&D as well?

Has a dystopian ring to it, "we don't need to clear up the nuclear waste, just take your thyroid pills and everything will be fine"

Live in the pod, eat the 3-headed radioactive bugs ...

Very similar to "we don't need to make quality of life higher, just take your depression pills and everything will be fine".

Air pollution causes not only cancer but a variety of health issues including things like asthma or even behavioral impacts. Small particulate matter can get into the blood circulation and then stay in your body with all kinds of long term effects. So even if this reduces the cancer risk, it probably still causes other issues and reducing air pollution is most likely still the ultimate solution.

"We don't/can't clean up the PFAS/lead, here's some bottled water"

Win-win: No need to invest into changing life-threatening tech and make money selling the protection. Profits can only rise!

Yeah, I know very Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg like ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad_fdYFHYXo ).

Hard to argue that that is not where we are though ...

It would be interesting to know if the probability of developing cancer has a linear relationship with the amount of air pollution. For example would double the amount of PM2.5 pollution double the cancer risk?

Probably quadruple (but I’m just guessing)

This sounds amazing, and anything that go towards curing cancer is fantastic.

I do hope this means that we don’t give up trying to reduce pollution though, that it won’t sap the resolve for clean air.

It's about prevention, and the way from observation that cancers need a trigger to actual workable preventatives is long and fraught with failure.

This is a known fact: PM 2.5 causes irreversible inflammation of the specific cells, leading to an immune cascading effect that may go unregulated. The timing of the news is with the Oncology conference, so it attracts more attention. It is rehashed news. It requires an environmental clean up, but must be balanced by the costs. It is usually difficult to reverse sunk costs for prior human activity. Often, it requires careful deliberation around vehicular pollution.

"And it may now be possible to develop drugs that stop cancers forming."

Maybe try to stop the pollution?

Way less profitable.

If I were at a cigarette company, I’d be telling my bosses to fund this research more so then they’d be able to market “cigarettes that don’t cause cancer” right?

You mean arguing that our air is so dirty that lighting up a cigarette and inhaling actually improves the quality of the air that you breathe? :P

“Yep!!!”

- cigarette marketing company

Wonderful, don’t worry about polition, just take this pill… I know it’s cynical take but we should take pollution way more seriously in the place

Don't know about you but I'd rather not get cancer while we sort out our polution problems, thank you very much.

So... zombie cells cause by pollution?

Seems like a convenient discovery, given the circumstances at the moment.

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