Re: cancer rates (was: e: How do you calm down the hot-heads?)

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Sat Sep 13 2003 - 08:19:32 MDT

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    On Fri, 12 Sep 2003, Kevin Freels wrote:

    > It would be nice to have some data on the number of children that died of
    > cancer 200 years ago as compared to now.

    Kevin, I agree that it would be interesting data but I suspect
    it would be a minor blip in the childhood death rates due to
    the childhood diseases for which there were no vaccines and/or
    malnutrition. For those reasons it might not be possible to
    use the data productively. On top of that one has to consider the
    environment -- are you talking industrial London (which was probably
    much more polluted than modern cities -- remember coal was the primary
    fuel back then) or non-industrial cities (say Bombay)?

    Most (though perhaps not all) childhood cancers are due to defects
    in the developmental process. They are the result of the random
    errors in the process of replicating DNA -- or in some cases predisposing
    errors that may have taken place in the production of gamete cells.
    Perhaps the best example of a drug (not a pollutant) causing
    problems in either gamete production or early development would
    be thalidomide [1,2,3].

    Robert

    1. http://www.fda.gov/cder/news/thalinfo/default.htm
    2. http://www.aegis.com/factshts/network/simple/thalid.html
    3. http://www.celgene.com/thalomid/



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