cancer
cmonforton | May 13, 2011That's the question posed by Jon Stewart's Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi in his "Ored to Death" segment broadcast on May 12. Mandvi interviews G. Bernard Coulombe, the general manager of the proposed Jeffrey asbestos mine in Quebec, Canada, who reports the mine will produce 200 TONS annually of chrysotile fibers. In the segment, Mandvi really asks:
"does asbestos mean something different in French than it does in English?? Because in English it means it means a SLOW, HACKING DEATH."
The fact that this five minute "news" segment appears on Comedy Central doesn't take away from the…
lborkowski | May 11, 2011The American Society of Magazine Editors has announced its 2010 award winners, and I found it striking that three of the winning pieces address the issue of cancer. Over the past couple of years, we've heard more cautions about the downsides of aggressive screening for breast and prostate cancers - and then we occasionally also hear about the relatively young man or woman whose cancer is caught and treated early thanks to such aggressive practices. At the population level, we compile statistics about risk and survival rates, but those are easy to forget about when someone we love gets the…
cmonforton | April 22, 2011Earlier this month, in my post "CDC's NIOSH says WHAT about asbestos???" I reported on the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health's (NIOSH) new treatise on asbestos, and my dismay with the agency's characterization of the mineral as a "potential occupational carcinogen." NIOSH's current intelligence bulletins are supposed to convey the most up-to-date scientific information on a hazard and risk of harm from exposure to it. All the leading scientific organizations across the globe, including the World Health Organization's IARC and HHS' National Toxicology Program, recognize…
oracknows | April 19, 2011
I just learned something that will sadden the heart of any Doctor Who fan. Elizabeth Sladen, who played longtime companion of the Doctor Sarah Jane Smith, has died of cancer:
Doctor Who star Elisabeth Sladen, who was also in spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures, has died aged 63.
Sladen appeared as Doctor Who assistant Sarah Jane Smith in the BBC television sci-fi series between 1973 and 1976, opposite Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.
The Liverpool-born actress appeared in four series from 2007 of The Sarah Jane Adventures on children's channel CBBC.
Sladen had been battling cancer for some…
oracknows | April 17, 2011Oh, no!
It's the toxins!
It's the chemicals!
Evil, evil, evil, evil! Even worse, unnatural, unnatural, unnatural!
Such is the message we receive from many sources. The media bombards us with it constantly. Environmental groups do too. The message is so pervasive that most people take it for granted that various toxins are "poisoning" them and causing cancer. Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying that there is not a potential risk from various chemicals that might cause cancer. Indeed, less than a year ago I wrote a lengthy post about the President's Cancer Panel Report from 2010 in which, I…
oracknows | April 12, 2011They call them Necromancers.
Necromancers have an uncanny ability to resurrect an old thread by commenting on it months, even years, after the last comment. Unfortunately, as hard as it is to believe, the version of Movable Type used by Seed to power our blogs does not have a preference panel that allows us to turn off our comments on posts after a set amount of time, for instance three months. Consequently, every so often I"m plagued with Necromancers bringing long deceased comment threads back from the dead to the annoyance of all. Of course, the most annoying Necromancers are the one who…
cmonforton | April 12, 2011The practice of posting a notice about meetings between regulated parties and OMB staff began during the GW Bush Administration, not a group known for transparency. Even that very secretive Administration saw the value in informing the public promptly of such meetings. The Obama Administration's OIRA is now 0-2 when it comes to disclosure of meetings about OSHA rules. (Their performance may actually be even worse. For all I know they've had other meetings. We just don't know to look for them on OIRA's website.)
Serious health effects related to overexposure to respirable crystalline…
cmonforton | April 5, 2011[Update 4/22/2011: see CDC's NIOSH corrects asbestos statement]
It was almost too much to believe. Here I was attending the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization's (ADAO) annual meeting, mingling and learning from patients and researchers about asbestos-related disease, and I hear that the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has just issued its treatise on asbestos. That document, called a "current intelligence bulletin" is supposed to convey the most up-to-date scientific information on a hazard and risk of harm…
sa smith | April 4, 2011I talk about how viruses and endogenous retroviruses can cause cancer (and all kinds of other diseases) all the time here on ERV. But one thing I hope I highlight for you all as well is how the scientific community can use viruses as a tool. We can take advantage of their evolved tricks and our immune systems evolved tricks to create systems to treat diseases that have nothing at all to do with viruses or their associated diseases. Turn the tables on parasites-- use them for our advantage.
Gene therapy in humans, and viral promoters in GMO crops are a couple obvious examples that Ive…
oracknows | April 4, 2011It figures.
I don't know if it's confirmation bias or not, but it seems that every time I go away on a trip, some juicy bit of blog fodder pops up. So, right here, right now, while I'm at the AACR meeting soaking up the latest and greatest in cancer science, inevitably someone posts something that normally would provoke--nay, demand--an Orac-ian deconstruction full of the usual Insolence. So what is it this time?
Dana Ullman.
Yes, everybody's favorite homeopath for whom no science is too settled to twist and homeopathy and homeopathic "thinking" are in fact responsible for much of medical…
oracknows | March 31, 2011I realize this is two weeks old, but I had this hanging around, making it still worthwhile to discuss, because it's been bothering me, and last week Coulter wrote a blisteringly stupid followup to her blisteringly ignorant column from two weeks ago entitled A Glowing Report on Radiation. She wrote this article in the wake of the fears arising in Japan and around the world of nuclear catastrophe due to the damage to the Fukushima nuclear power plant caused by the earthquake and tsunami that hit northern Japan on March 11. Coulter was subsequently interviewed by Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly on…
oracknows | March 23, 2011As a cancer surgeon, one aspect of the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers that bothers me more than most others is how willingly academia has been to "integrate" quackery with science-based oncology to form the bastard stepchild known as "integrative oncology" that has metastasized to numerous cancer centers that should know better. Metastatic deposits of quackademia have infiltrated the University of Texas-M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, UCSF, Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and many others. It's quackademic medicine victorious out there; or at least so it seems.
Yet,…
oracknows | March 6, 2011A couple of weeks ago, the ever-inimitably sarcastic master of pus himself, Mark Crislip, posted an excellent deconstruction of a very disappointing article that was published in the most recent issue of Skeptical Inquirer, the flagship publication of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). I say "disappointing," because I was disappointed to see SI (Skeptical Inquirer, not Sports Illustrated) publish such a biased, poorly thought out article, apparently for the sake of controversy.
I've been an SI subscriber myself for several years, and usually enjoy reading the magazine, although of…
oracknows | February 21, 2011Why haven't we cured cancer yet?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we cure cancer?
If we can harness the atom, why can't we cure cancer?
How many times have you heard these questions, or variants thereof? How many times have you asked this question yourself? Sometimes, I even ask this question myself. Saturday was the two year anniversary of the death of my mother-in-law from a particularly nasty form of breast cancer, and, even though I am a breast cancer surgeon, I still wonder why there was nothing in the armamentarium of science-based medicine that could save her from a several…
sa smith | February 16, 2011There are lots of controversies in viral research.
Not just woo ones, like whether HIV-1 exists and causes AIDS, but real controversies that have been going on for some time, like whether HIV-1 infects dendritic cells or DCs just carry-->pass on virions.
The public hears about the stupid stuff, but dont know (dont care?) about the real controversies. This travesty has a third negative effect, in that sometimes the public never hears the resolution to the stupid stuff, thus it lives on in word-of-mouth whispers and the internets underbelly, long after science has soundly whooped the stupid…
sa smith | February 11, 2011A neat paper was just published in Nature, where they did complete genome sequencing of the prostate cancer tumors from seven advanced/aggressive prostate cancer patients.
The genomic complexity of primary human prostate cancer
Why did they want to do this? They hoped to identify some new features of aggressive prostate cancer that could be exploited for treatment purposes. A mutation obliterates Gene X? Maybe administering Protein X helps. A chromosomal rearrangement plops a strong promoter in front of Gene A? Maybe administering inhibitor of Protein A helps. Heck, maybe everyone has a…
oracknows | February 7, 2011
Occasionally, there are topics that my readers want -- nay, demand -- that I cover. The topic of this post, it turns out, is one of them. It's a link to a TED Talk. I'm guessing that most of our readers have either viewed (or at least heard of) TED talks. Typically, they are 20-minute talks, with few or no slides, by various experts and thought leaders. Many of them are quite good, although as the TED phenomenon has grown I've noticed that, not unexpectedly, the quality of TED Talks has become much more uneven than it once was. Be that as it may, beginning shortly after it was posted,…
oracknows | January 31, 2011Breast implants have been the subject of controversy since they were first developed in the 1960s, with the controversy reaching a head in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when thousands of women with silicone implants reported a variety of ailments, including autoimmune disease and a variety of other systemic illnesses. These reports led to a rash of lawsuits and, ultimately, the banning of silicone breast implants for general use for breast augmentation in 1992. After that, silicone breast implants were only permitted in women requiring breast reconstruction or women enrolled in clinical…
lborkowski | January 13, 2011by Eileen Senn, MS
The multiple options that OSHA is considering to address their badly outdated rules for chemical hazards were described in my November 17 post. They include updating OSHA Permissible Exposure Limits (PELs) which are erroneously considered to be safe levels for chemicals in workplace air. In reality, it's wrong to call them "safe" levels. Most PELs are based on toxic ignorance, that is, our lack of sound and complete toxicology data on most chemicals. It is the rare chemical that has been tested for all disease endpoints including cancer and effects on reproductive,…