What is the Cause of Cancer?
Of course we don't know.
The purpose of this section is to document some evidence that we do have, even if its anecdotal and non-scientific. We know that cancer is a disease of the 20th Century, and that before then, most people died from something else. Perhaps they didn't live long enough to contract it, but now we are.
I know that my wife's cancer probably had nothing to do with her heredity. There is a genetic component that leads to a pre-disposition to contracting cancer, and today's genetic testing can pinpoint it in certain individuals. But it accounts for only a minority of cancers. Why the rest? Adrian's genetic testing revealed no such disposition, and yet...
The notion that environmental factors cause cancer, perhaps facilitated by genetic vulnerabilities in some cases, is not a new one. But when we study the lives of those who have had it, we find some interesting correlations with certain life events and exposures. While this proves no cause and effect, its difficult to disregard them as merely conincidental.
Adrian was one of those post-war babies who underwent thymus irradiation treatment before she was one year old. In 1948, medical thinking was that an enlarged thymus gland in infants was abnormal, putting them at risk for all kinds of future maladies. The solution of the day borrowed from the same Cold War technology that then ruled the thinking of our political leaders, but in this case as a peacetime application. In a classic case of the "cure" being worse than the disease, the doctors used high doses of radiation to "shrink" enlarged thymus glands in the necks of babies, not realizing that it was just too easy for the dose to spill over into the nearby breast tissue of a squirming infant. For Adrian fifty-five years later, the overt manifestation of this latent damage made itself known in the form of a 3.5 centimeter tumor.
Today we learn that a non-nuclear bomb test that would have dredged up tons of still radioactive material from previous nuclear bomb tests will not occur in Nevada as planned. Too many people remember the cancers caused by nuclear fallout from testing in the 1950's and 60's.
How do you convince people who have been through the hell of the radiation exposure cases that they can rely on the government? I'm not sure you could," said Sen.Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.
As we trusted some of our doctors in the past regarding certain medical procedures, we trusted our political leaders when they told us that windblown radiation from nuclear testing was absolutely safe. We trusted them then. My wife and I thougt it sadly ironic when she was undergoing radiation therapy to kill whatever vestiges of cancer that might have survived chemotherapy and surgery, we were using an improved and more controlled form of the same technology that probably gave her the cancer to begin with.
PAUL HILL
Related Story: Chemicals: "PFOA and its chemical cousins are man-made substances that since the 1950s have become ubiquitous in the environment, from the Arctic Ocean to the soils of rural Georgia."