Tag Archive: cancer
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Reflections on Smoking
Letting Go
Great read in The New Yorker
Letting Go
When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs.
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When New York banned smoking in the workplace, I quit working. When it was banned in restaurants, I stopped eating out and when the price of cigarettes hit seven dollars a pack I gathered all my stuff together and went to France.
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Just after my mom started chemotherapy, she sent me three cartons of Kool Milds. “They were on sale,” she croaked. Dying or not, she should have known that I smoked full-strength Filter Kings, but then I looked at them and thought, Well, they are free. It took some getting used to, but by the time my mother was cremated I’d switched over.
Measles, HPV may contribute to Lung Cancer Risk
Another good reason for vaccination
The association between viruses and various types of cancer has been well established.
As much as 20% of the world’s cancers have been linked to infections. In addition to the connection between HPVs and cervical cancer, chronic infections by hepatitis-B and -C viruses contribute to liver cancer, and the bacterium Helicobacter pylori has been associated with stomach cancer.
There is now evidence of another pathogen actor, this time in some types of lung cancer:
Samuel Ariad of the Soroka Medical Center in Beer Sheva, Israel, and his colleagues began by analyzing tumours taken from 65 lung cancer patients. They found evidence of measles virus proteins in about half of their samples.
In addition, Arash Rezazadeh of the University of Louisville in Kentucky and his colleagues tested 23 lung cancer tumours for HPVs. In five cases, the samples tested positive for the virus’s DNA. Others have previously shown a possible link between the virus and lung cancer, but, as in this case, have relied on small sample sizes.
It is hoped that widespread use of the HPV vaccine Gardasil® will positively impact rates of lung cancer but at this stage it is unverified. It will likely take a generation to see any statistical evidence of the effect.
The paedophile tumor
How to get a head in child porn
Brain tumour causes uncontrollable paedophilia
The sudden and uncontrollable paedophilia exhibited by a 40-year-old man was caused by an egg-sized brain tumour, his doctors have told a scientific conference. And once the tumour had been removed, his sex-obsession disappeared.
This is interesting because it points to the organic/biological nature of paedophilia. Generally recidivism for paedophilia is very high - up to 40% or more.
If it is clearly demonstrated that a person has no control over such urges, then more research into medical interventions (as opposed to strictly penal interventions) could be justified.
The man, a schoolteacher, began secretly visiting child pornography web sites and soliciting prostitutes at massage parlours, activities he had not engaged in previously. Swerdlow says while the man felt that his new behaviour was unacceptable, “in his words, the ‘pleasure principle’ overrode his restraint”.
Man has the Blood of a Girl
The CSI guys would have a field day
Man who undergoes stem cell therapy for leukemia and is cured… but the story ends with a bit of a twist.
The engraftment had worked. A wave of relief washed over Drew as he hugged his family. There was more, the doctor said. Drew wasn’t just a new man. “Your blood is 100 percent female,” he said. Eric Drew, now a 37-year-old man, had the blood of an Italian girl.
