One in six cancers – two million a year globally – are caused by largely treatable or preventable infections, new estimates suggest.
The Lancet Oncology review, which looked at incidence rates for 27 cancers in 184 countries, found four main infections are responsible. These four – human papillomaviruses, Helicobacter pylori and hepatitis B and C viruses – account for 1.9m cases of cervical, gut and liver cancers.
Most cases are in the developing world.
The team from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in France says more efforts are needed to tackle these avoidable cases and recognise cancer as a communicable disease.
I do not trust the Lancet. They are a left-wing driven outfit. They published plain lies that millions of Iraqi civilians were killed in the Iraq war. They lie when they want to and there is no way to tell the purposeful lies from anything that might be unbiased.
Well, HPV does cause tons of morbidity and mortality, and Hepatitis B and C is well known to increase the risk of liver cancer. Helicobacter pylori is associated with an increased risk of a particular type of lymphome, but that’s not super common I would guess (don’t know esactly).
Gardasil sounds like a great vaccine that will be super beneficial to society
Paul W. Ewald, biologist, is an early proponent of the theory that infections and viruses cause cancers, heart disease, and etc. His Plague Time is especially good.
The Lancet was also among the first to lend credence to the vaccine-autism junk science. Still, those pathogens are well known carcinogens.
Steve, what you are illustrating here is the damage that a publication does to itself if it ever publishes something shown later to be utterly false. The French team may well be entirely correct, but the damage the Lancet did to itself over MMR will last a long time.
Maybe they can fight it out with the AGW crowd to see who can save the most lives per dollar spent. I guess that those lives will be very expensive.
can you imagine how much more advanced medical science would be if the enviro nutters fear mongering campaigns about a microscopic, trace atmospheric gas hadn’t resulted in more than $1 trillion dollars being diverted from science to fretting over carbon dioxide?
Because there is always an opportunity cost.
This Lancet review losses credibility immediately because it ignores the reality of SECOND HAND SMOKE…..there are reliable reports SECOND HAND SMOKE can peel the chrome of a ’57 Chevy bumber at 10 paces upwind.
(sarc) for those who drink the koolaid…..
Helicobacter pylori is responsible for some types of stomach ulcers, along with severe digestive upset. It is easily treatable (ciprifloxazine) but reinfection seems to be easy.
I wonder if it is associated with colon cancer.
I recovered from Hep B
But being white my female doctor lied to men (me)
I Survived. She has a career dealing with entitled old women.
Surprised?
Don’t be.
Dwright
Liberal Progressive eugenics via global vaccinations, their starting to riot over this in India, but we like our kids autistic & physically sick over here. Easier population control and pumps billions into Big Pharma.
Killing two or three birds with one stone, pardon the pun.
“One in six cancers – two million a year globally”
Are there only 12 million cancer cases among seven billion people in the world? Hardly worth talking about. I suspect 12 million is a bit low. I also suspect that more than one in six might be contagious.
“This Lancet review losses credibility immediately because it ignores the reality of SECOND HAND SMOKE”
It also ignores the dreadful phenomena of “third hand smoke” (the smell of smoke on clothing, etc.), “fourth hand smoke” (the trauma caused by witnessing someone smoking) and the newly discovered “fifth hand smoke” (anxiety caused by the thought that somewhere, someone is smoking).
Until these horrendous issues are dealt with, a trivial item such as a cancer vaccine must be put on the back burner.
What Steve, Sasquatch and biffjr said.
The efforts today by some to eliminate water chlorination and milk pasteurization is part of junk medical science. If this effort is successful, look for the death rate among the young and old to increase rapidly. But then, isn’t this the aim of the followers of Gia.
From an article in Canada’s History April/May issue, by Isolde Prince. The article “Swat the Fly” talks about the high rat of infant mortality in the late 1800s. In Toronto one in ten infants died before the age of one. In 1910, Canadian cities began to chlorinate water and pasteurize milk, as well extending sewer lines and eliminating outdoor privies.
Typhoid rates dropped dramatically from 40.8 victims per 100,000 in 1910 to 1.9 per 100,000 in 1915.
Those viruses do seem to be related to cancer, but what doesn’t make sense is why millions of people exposed to those virus DON’T get cancer.
Hep B and Hep C are associated with liver cancer but fortunately 95% of people develop immunity against HepB and eradicate it. Hep C is a lot more chronic as only 1/3 of people infected spontaneously eradicate it. Don’t have to worry much about HepC in Canada unless you have a propensity for sharing syringes while injecting drugs.
H. pylorii is interesting in that the default human condition for millenia seems to have been infected with H. pylorii. It’s a cause of gastric carcinoma. However, once H. pylorii is treated, esophageal cancer rates go up. The drug companies love this bug as they can provide the antibiotics to eradicate H. pylorii and then the proton pump inhibitors (PPI’s) to eliminate stomach acid so that chronic reflux doesn’t end up causing esophageal cancer. PPI’s are one of the largest selling drug families on the planet.
HPV, IMHO, is one of the biggest scams that big pharma has foisted on the population. Yes, there is an association between HPV and cervical cancer. I haven’t reviewed the literature in detail, but when I was in medical school gynecologists were just as sure about HSV-2 as the cause of cervical cancer. We’ve got a very good system in place to detect cervical cancer early and that involves women having regular pap smears done.
Now, I’ve seen a flood of women coming into my clinic terrified about HPV. This is in a community where the most common gynecologic infection I see is chlamydia. None of these women have any visible condyloma’s and, on further questioning, I ascertained that there are frequent TV ads on the topic of HPV. I don’t watch TV so I have to get my information second hand. I’m getting tired of having to examine perfectly normal vulva’s because the woman things she has a wart following the viewing of an idiotic TV commercial (not many have taken up my suggestion to turn off the TV completely).
Women want to get vaccinated against HPV and it seems the $200 ripoff cost of the vaccine doesn’t deter them. They don’t seem interested in my suggestion that perhaps using condoms with new sexual partners might prevent them from picking up both new strains of HPV and chlamydia.
My prediction is that the HPV vaccination scare campaign will result in more cases of cervical cancer. Women will figure that they’re protected by the vaccine and will not bother getting paps done (not a favorite medical procedure in the female population). Those early cases of cervical cancer that could have easily been cured will now turn into metastatic disease. Maybe in 10 years time we’ll suddenly discover that oops, HPV wasn’t the culprit after all and we latch onto some new sexually transmitted virus previously unknown. I make it a point of telling drug reps that I consider the whole HPV vaccine campaign to be a scam and I actually turn down free meals at nice restaurants if the topic is HPV vaccination.
My opinion is that nutritional factors are far more important in cancer than is thought but Vitamin D3 is available for free by just walking outside in the sun (without sunscreen except on the face) and other vitamins are so cheap that drug companies have an interest in ensuring they don’t get much publicity.
/rant
Excellent comment, Loki. It would seem from your detailed remarks that people are being systematically terrified to death and stampeded into getting treatments for things which are not actually problems.
Damn, and I just read an aricle from Drudge where the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) stated Hotdogs caused all the cancer and obesity.
,
Rush said yesterday on his show that “scientists” suspect that sunscreen may cause skin cancer.
My take on Medicine these days is pretty low. Notice how TV doesn’t have any Hospital or Medical shows anymore? Except the odd lone wolf Doctor. The reality has become a horror show. Not a cause for hope.
Too many know what an emergency room in Canada is like. Soon if not already, so will too many Americans.
Its the age of triage Medicine now.
Where medical bureaucrats make more than Doctors or Nurses. Where Physicians can make no decisions, but none medical paper slaves do, on life & death.
Now with antibiotics become ever more useless, its back to the 19th century.
biffjr, hilarious commentary. I like your comment about “fifth hand smoke” so much I think I’ll steal it and use it on some of my militant anti-smoker colleagues.
Thanks cgh. Right now that vaccine industry seems out of control — having brought all of the dangerous infections under control they’re trying to create markets. Another scam is the varicella zoster vaccine. Have had elderly patients come in wanting the vaccine despite the $200 cost. A course of valcylovir to treat a case of shingles costs between $100-150 and, if the shingles is treated early, there is almost never any residual post-herpetic neuralgia (at least in my experience). Educating people about the symptoms of shingles would be worthwhile and I’ve now started treating patients when they just have the pain before the characteristic rash has appeared. This gives even better results.
Of course, with the recurrence of VZV, peoples antibody levels go back up and they have no need of a varicella vaccine. That hasn’t stopped people who had shingles the year before coming in and asking for the vaccine.
I agree with Fred.
While the AGW types scare monger and make false predictions about the number of deaths due to global warming, they’ve starved the debates on things that can really be helped.
Seems to fit Dr. Fruit Fly’s agenda perfectly.
Dunnit?
I hope that by growing some of my own veggies, not panicking about sun exposure, avoiding over-processed foods, exercising moderately by walking, riding my bike and working in my garden, having a sardonic sense of humor, drinking good scotch and red wine, I will live reasonably well until I die. I no longer make my health choices according to the most recent scam/scare in the medical journals or the Globe and Mail. Life is too short for that nonsense.
Liberal Progressive eugenics via global vaccinations, their starting to riot over this in India, but we like our kids autistic & physically sick over here.
Is there a tin foil shortage reported where you live?
@Loki: HPV and VZV are not ‘scams’. The HPV is pretty effective and the virus-cancer link well established. As for VZV: maybe people just don’t want to go through the pain of shingles can’t say I blame them.
This is all another reason I’m glad to be vaccinated against Hep B!
That’s the way to live, Rita.
Loki@4:07:
Isn’t it true that GERD is strongly correlated with esophageal cancer; and isn’t the use of PPI’s strongly correlated with the diminishment or reversal of the effects—dysplasia, Barrett’s, etc.—of GERD on the lining of the esophagus? Aren’t PPIs so widely used because they work?
…A course of valcylovir to treat a case of shingles costs between $100-150 and, if the shingles is treated early, there is almost never any residual post-herpetic neuralgia (at least in my experience)….
I was in the Dr’s office first thing in the morning after the first symptom hit, around 1997 or so, and was immediately prescribed the antiviral…the residual pain lasted for almost 10 years and still makes itself known once in a while today…although in my case, it was the optic nerve that was the pathway and the upper quadrant of my head that was involved, so maybe the area affected makes a difference in the duration of the neuralgia ?
I’d gladly have taken a vaccine if I’d thought it might prevent that experience and will be looking into the odds of it preventing another outbreak if I have it now…I honestly don’t know if I could go through that again.
Nick: (re PPI’s)
I’m diabetic. A few years ago, after about ten years on pills alone, my remaining functioning islets gave up. Since they don’t send you a card saying “I’m outta here!”, I kept taking my pills while my blood sugar levels went up and up and up. Finally, I went into extreme sugar overload, and started vomiting non-stop. Being male, I naturally waited two days before going to the hospital.
Once there, I was quickly diagnosed, and put on insulin. However, two days of continuous regurgitation had made my esophagus so sore, I couldn’t take anything but water by mouth. After snaking a tube down my throat for a look-see, the docs prescribed 1) a bland diet (no spicy curry for you!), and 2) a course of PPI’s. I asked how long I would have to take the latter, and the ENT said “For the rest of your life!”. This made little sense to me, so I did some reading.
I bought a bottle of Gaviscon for $8, and used it for a week. I avoided spicy food for a couple of weeks more. Then, when the free samples of the PPI’s ran out, I didn’t bother renewing.
Two years later, I enjoy all the foods I used to, I don’t have GERD, and I don’t even need Tums. I think there are doctors who over-prescribe certain meds. When the only tool you have is a hammer..
ahhhh…gaviscon….
after many, many years of suffering from ‘duodenal ulcers’ the first non-military Dr. I went to prescribed a round of antibiotics for H.pylorii and I got immediate relief although the reflux continued for awhile but after taking tagamet, ranitidine and every other brand name of PPI going for years and having esophageal scopes and barium x-rays every time I turned around, I tried gaviscon and haven’t had much of a problem since…or needed a scope done…I’d do a commercial for them if they asked.
Given that the medial elite are attahed to the scientific elite who are cirrently running the global warming scare as an excuse to get rif of 9 out of 10 of us “cancers on the environment”, I don’t expect much will be done about 3rd world cancer rates. Just what is in that juice the WHO keeps injecting into 3rd woeld populations?
I took the point of the thread to be: Here is an example of a scientific field that is in no way “settled”, where experts and informed specialists disagree on the causes and cures of certain medical conditions. Which is the same attitude that should be taken with regards to global warming. It isn’t, and is never, “settled”.