Understanding Cancer

It's taken a while - 200 years or more - and maybe now, we are starting to finally understand and reconcile tha the damage we're doing to the external environment in loss of biodiversity is echoed in a loss to our own internal health.

In a recent paper pubished in Nature, scientists from Manchester University revealed results of research that indicated a potential total lack of cancer in pre-industrial cultures, suggesting that one of the world's biggest killers, cancer, could be man-made.

Rosalie David and Michael Zimmerman's article abstract reads: "In industrialized societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. The history of this disorder has the potential to improve our understanding of disease prevention, aetiology, pathogenesis and treatment. A striking rarity of malignancies in ancient physical remains might indicate that cancer was rare in antiquity, and so poses questions about the role of carcinogenic environmental factors in modern societies. Although the rarity of cancer in antiquity remains undisputed, the first published histological diagnosis of cancer in an Egyptian mummy demonstrates that new evidence is still forthcoming". The full article can be read here

A question for us to consider would be one of working out the timeline to starting to address issues of our term health as though we were serious about a) reducing unnecessary death and suffering, b) reducing unneccessary spending on diseases we don't to have, c) start behaving as though we were homo sapiens