Dramatic rise in cancer in people under 50
news.harvard.edu
news.harvard.edu
(Of course, more than zero is worth looking into, I'm just curious if the alarmism is warranted.)
Edit: citing my comment below, the best info I could reasonably find on mobile (I'm now 35 minutes into answering the question that the stupid headline raised) is:
> - it's about +5% as a very rough estimate of an overall average.
> - The highest I see is typically in Korea, up to about 20%, but often (for different cancer types) also around 5% or even negative in one case. (Keep in mind that 20% more may be peanuts if the original chance was one in a million. Is thyroid cancer common?)
> - USA average is more like 2% I'd guess, with maxima of like 5%.
> - Sweden is negative as often as positive, maybe +1%? Large error bars, though.
> Dramatic? You be the judge, but the original authors never used that word
I skimmed the whole article by now and am reverting back to the 260 data points (10 counties × 13 cancers × 2 genders) shown on page 3 to do it myself. Currently I'm wondering how to consolidate into a single number (on mobile). Should I eyeball guesstimate the percentage for each country, look up their population, and do a weighted average or what would be a good way to do this? Ideally I'd also compute the lower and upper bounds with the 95% CI values... Hmm
Edit: ah it refers to a supplementary table, not shown in the paper, for the original data. So I don't have to eyeball it. Downloading that. Let's see
... what did I expect. 4 pages filled from top to bottom with numbers in narrow table cells. Text is not copyable, maybe due to the mobile pdf reader idk. But I'm going to draw the line here
Eyeballing that thing on page 3 of the article:
- it's about +5% as a very rough estimate of an overall average.
- The highest I see is typically in Korea, up to about 20%, but often (for different cancer types) also around 5% or even negative in one case. (Keep in mind that 20% more may be peanuts if the original chance was one in a million. Is thyroid cancer common?)
- USA average is more like 2% I'd guess, with maxima of like 5%.
- Sweden is negative as often as positive, maybe +1%? Large error bars, though.
Dramatic? You be the judge, but the original authors never used that word
Like for instance, in wealthier countries, rates of esophageal cancer dropped. Maybe because of better drugs for treating reflux. How is that expected to relate to rates of kidney cancer in poorer countries?
> (Of course, more than zero is worth looking into, I'm just curious if the alarmism is warranted.)
>They couldn’t precisely measure what proportion of this growing prevalence could solely be attributed to screening and early detection. However, they noted that increased incidence of many of the 14 cancer types is unlikely due to enhanced screening alone.
Not exactly! Many of the cancer rates in many countries were actually below 0%! Dramatic :)
Like it just has to be, in about 2-3 generations we've just utterly abandoned tens of thousands of years of fairly consistently eating variations on plants, cooked animal flesh, and fermented variations of the same, in favor of a staggering array of highly pre-processed chemicals.
The results are obvious and instantly visible everywhere: massive increases in obesity, chronic conditions like fatigue and depression, and so on. We're poisoning ourselves.
The only other contender that comes to mind is being constantly surrounded by and consuming plastic. Which is basically another thread on the same basic issue of our industrialized diets.
Hey maybe I'm wrong. But probably not right?
But processed food is a likely culprit.
I hope the majority of the increase is due to enhanced screening. Anything that gives us more time to solve the cancer problem!
We should be very cautious about immediately jumping to the conclusion that something we don't like (plastics, mobile phones, vaccines) is probably terribly carcinogenic despite the lack of causal evidence.
Some common plastics are also known cancer risks — if you heat them up or dissolve them, and inhale the fumes. Personally, I believe my hobby with synthetic resins and styrene (using solvent-based "glue") is what could have caused the B-cell lymphoma that I am suffering from.
I say "cancer risks" because it is not either/or: It is about probabilities. Cancer mutations actually happen often in the body, and the immune system is constantly fighting them. It is when the immune system loses that you "get cancer".
Think it depends
If exposure is based on good evidence that it is safe, and/or personal choice is involved, then absolutely, e.g. Vaccines, RF.
However, when humans are being exposed to an environment outside that to which we are adapted to (usually because the market has been largely left to get on with it), e.g. plastics exposure, continuous traffic and aircraft noise, pollution, sugar loaded convenience foods, fast food rich environments, places that prioritise vehicle movement over humans etc.
Then in those cases its worth noting that historically they are good health outcomes, e.g. smoking, leaded petrol, alcohol, hydrogenated vegetable fat, DDT etc. In general there aren't that many animals that thrive in the long-term outside of their evolutionary niches. And personally as an Engineer I don't think waiting for the scientific process to fight its way through the vested interests to start doing something about things that are very likely problems is a sensible approach.
There’s more things killing you slowly. Look to stress as a major driver of these things as well. (I.e. Sapolsky’s work)
But we’re talking about cancer incidence not deaths. Which—like the “rise” is autism—is quite likely due to early detection & patient awareness than external factors.
For example, ozone layer hole sure did increase the cases in South America.
In North America, maybe the industrialization and bad diet.
Living literally the opposite lifestyle from the one our bodies are made for.
Not a surprise.
I find this argument always very weird, especially on hacker news. Just because something wasn't made for X, doesn't that mean you can't or shouldn't use it for X? That's basically the definition of hacking in the hacker news sense of the word. By this logic, we shouldn't be taking any mode of transportation because we didn't evolve to sail, drive, or fly. Heck, we shouldn't be writing on the Internet, let alone writing at all!
Wouldn't it make more sense to argue the point itself, e.g. our bodies don't deal well with X because of Y, rather than citing historic evolutionary pressures?
Just because you can use your impact driver as a hammer doesn't mean its going to last if you use it like one. It doesn't seem contradictory to acknowledge that you can do all sorts of things, but some of those things are going to have varying levels of consequences.
There is a sense of optimism that I see in people that everything new is good. I had that same optimism for a long time. But so did people who were using leaded gas and xrays for fitting shoes. Now I reflexively don't trust anything that doesn't have a long history of successful usage.
I am not saying this is wrong. It does, though, decrease the number of kids we have.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-...
The propaganda part:
"By far the biggest ultimate impact is having one fewer child, which the researchers calculated equated to a reduction of 58 tonnes of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life."
If you look into the source study:
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_...
Specifically at Figure 6, you'll note that those 58 tonnes refer to the peak of the "carbon legacy curve".
As an environmentalist I'm indignant that such an association was ever drawn.
For one: who says the next generation will have nearly the same carbon footprint? That's already not the case currently and the trend is clear.
I always have two specific lifespans in mind when I say this: my late father’s and that of a man he admired and studied under in his youth: Alexander Fleming. Go back before Fleming’s birth in 1881 and you are in the medical dark ages in some respects.
The NHS is really only a human lifespan old.
(and not in some sensible "did you know actually leeches are still useful for healing wounds?" way. just old school bloodletting.)
Now are we going to start observing the influence of that on the human immune system in four generations? No. Forty? Maybe a little bump in the noise floor. Four hundred? Almost certainly yes.
As a counterpoint, transportation is a major feature of modern technology that has resulted in a lot more mixing of heritable traits that could previously have been regionally isolated. That's probably a net good thing for robustness.
Kind of pointless mental exercise but something I ponder on occasionally.
If they had this data, it could perhaps answer your question.
But I would say that microplastics do play a negative role.
If it was cellphones it would be easy to spot as places where they are closest to (left/right hip, head) would be ones with increased cancer rates
The power is at a maximum 3 watts, and is usually measured in milliwatts if you're somewhere with excellent reception.
This is roughly on par with the amount of heat released while charging. Not fast charging mind you, charging with an old micro usb 5v charger.
Compare this to a radio station which can transmit tens of kilowatts of power. If radio waves could cause cancer, people who work at radio stations would be riddled with it, and radio stations have been around a lot longer than phones.
That is, wouldn’t we want to compare the radiant flux rather than the power?
Also how much time do you actually spend with the phone against your head on any given day? A few minutes maybe. Someone working at the radio station is there for 8 hours.
I don’t have an opinion on whether mobile phone usage is more or less likely to cause cancer than working in a radio station.
Cell phones are not the problem (well, not the microwaves at least).
You can measure the energy of one photo using this equation.
Microwaves at 2.45 Ghz = 1.6243499999999998e-24 eV
Gamma radiation at 3 x 10(19) Hz = 1.9889999999999998e-14 eV
So about 10(10) more energy per gamma ray photo or about 10 billion times more energy.
I'm sorry I have lost the paper when upgrading my home PC over the years. I too would like to read follow-up studies, if there are any. If anyone reading this knows what paper I am talking about, please do reply.
Smoking prevalence has reduced dramatically in the past fifty years. If anything that should be a declining reason over the course of the last century.
Is anybody actually surprised? We eat crappier and crappier food, even basic stuff like vegetables is heavily modified, pumped directly with insecticides, herbicides, and drains from nearby farms that could contain literally anything. Most fish went from very healthy to questionable at best. We move much much less. We have more but are less happy and have more stressful lives. Race to bottom puts sugar into all processed foods just to make them more addictive. Microplastics. BPAs. PFOAs. And so on and on. The idea that somehow this would have 0 negative effect is a bit naive, no?
Smartphones might genuinely be a thing future generations will look at asking "what were you thinking?", but this argument is completely moot, as it could be used against literally anything.
Studies will suggest that electricity is not harmful until it is. Studies will suggest that freedom of speech is not harmful until it is. Studies will suggest that touching grass is not harmful until it is.
Coincidentally, they correlate with the countries that have a high life expectancy.
But beware, the average cancer mortality there has been decreasing for decades.
If you're unlucky, you might just die of old age...
Same goes for parabens in cosmetics (read banning of specific parabens in the EU), you can't act surprised that some turn out to have an agonistic effect like estrogen and be potentially carcinogenic in women and accumulate in vitro when you throw it at the market with little real safety data. The biggest joke I've read is a recent-ish review concluding that consumers can cross the maximum recommended daily exposure with just a few cosmetics containing specific parabens because it was underestimated how much consumers use.