Korean Job Discussion Forums

[blade]

Maybe the hippies were right after all?

[recessiontime]

thanks for posting this. Very interesting.

[blackjack]

and the rebuttal

http://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2010/10/14/claims-that-cancer-is-only-a-�modern-man-made-disease�-are-false-and-misleading/

[northway]

Their adjustment for life-expectancy seems rather cursory.

[blade]

[interestedinhanguk]

[Xylox]

Not enough time to die from cancer when you are middle aged at 13.

[blade]

[blade]

[interestedinhanguk]

[interestedinhanguk]

Interesting how they only used mummies from 2 areas.

[blade]

[Caffeinated]

A flu killed them off faster than cancer in those days.

[Hindsight]

Thanks for the laugh, Blade. I don't think I've ever read anything so funny outside of Weekly World News.

Let me see if I've got this right: She looks at some mummies that are thousands of years old, doesn't see any cancer, so she concludes that cancer didn't exist prior to the Industrial Revolution, which began less than 200 years ago. Ergo, cancer does not occur naturally, and is only the result of the ills of modern society.

There seems to be a bit of a gap here.

And speaking of gaps, didn't the Egyptian undertakers remove key internal organs before mummification, such as the brain?

And speaking of the brainless, if you ever need a reminder that some people with fancy titles or professorships can be complete idiots, remember this name: Professor Rosalie David, biomedical Egyptologist at the University of Manchester.

Of course cancer can occur naturally, and killed plenty of people before industrialization, or even before agriculture. That's why Egyptians have darker skin than someone from, say, Manchester, England -- their ancestors with light skin were killed by skin cancer.

And when man discovered fire, you can bet some of them died of lung cancer after years of crouching over a fire, especially when it was in a cave.

And when they soaked themselves in a nice hot springs with natural radium or other radioactive minerals, and drank the water, what do you think happened?

And, of course, there was water pollution before industrialization from natural petroleum seeps, with lots of carcinogenic benzene and toluene in it.

And then there are the hereditary cancers and spontaneous cancers, particularly ones afflicting children like neuroblastoma. There is no known environmental cause because there isn't any. Neuroblastoma occurs at the rate of 1 per 100,000 all over the world.

[PCRamplified]

Mostly what hindsight said. The immediate thing that pops into my mind when I read it is that it would be a statistical mess to try to figure out how to analyze and compare the data. And I'm not a statistician, so I wouldn't even know where to begin, but it would be interesting to see what some bio-statisticians would have to say.

For instance if you have a group of women aged 16- 24 to compare and in mummies you see, say(numbers 100% made up off the top of my head):

Death due to violence/accident: 8%
Death due to infection/illness: 27%
Death during childbirth: 48%
Death due to heart problems: 2%
Death due to cancer: less than 1%
Other: 5%
Cause of death unknown: 9%

And in a group of modern women the same age you see:

Death due to violence/accident: 70%
Death due to infection/illness: 2%
Death during childbirth: 1%
Death due to heart problems: 2%
Death due to cancer: 19%
other: 5%
Cause of death unknown: less than 1%

You can't automatically say that the rate of cancer is much higher now than it was in ancient times, or that we are much more accident prone and violent society. You have to be able to somehow normalize for the fact that we are able to prevent most deaths due to illness, infection, childbirth, etc. I have no clue how you would go about doing that. I'd think you would basically have to have some way to arrive at a rate of occurrence of cancer per # of living people in a particular cohort rather than per % of dead folks.