Word: cancer
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...controversy resurfaced in July with the publication of a study in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute (JNCI) in which researchers analyzed more than 19,000 patients who participated in clinical trials involving treatments for a variety of cancers. The paper found that all other factors being equal, black patients had on average a significantly lower cancer survival rate than whites. Given that all patients were participating in the same clinical trials, the authors said, there was no difference in terms of access to care. Researchers said also that even after adjusting for patients' socioeconomic status, the survival...
That conclusion, critics quickly responded, was flawed. "Race is a sociological concept, not a biological category," says Otis Brawley, the chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. "But this study brings race into medicine as a biological categorization." According to the Human Genome Project, people are indeed well over 99% identical; at the molecular level race is imperceptible. But even while Albain's and other similar studies don't do much to shift the prevailing medical opinion - that disparities in health are fueled mainly by socioeconomics and access to care - they remind...
...sure, no one is accusing authors like Albain of racism, and people on both sides of the debate want to save lives. But the treatment of race by some medical researchers continues to create a stir. Lisa Carey, a breast cancer specialist at the University of North Carolina, believes that biological differences may well contribute to differences in health, such as the one Albain found, but that any discussion of race turns automatically contentious. "The idea of differences between races has been fraught with misuse over the years, and not just in medicine. Everyone is leery that it could...
...scraps of clothing with Maltese labels - eventually led officials to a Libyan man named Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who was convicted of murder in 2001, and remains the only person to have served time for the atrocity. But after serving eight years, Al-Megrahi, who suffers from terminal prostate cancer, was freed Aug. 20 from a Scottish prison on "compassionate grounds." The decision to release the 57-year-old Al-Megrahi, who continues to proclaim his innocence, sparked outrage from victims' families and drew a condemnation from the Obama Administration, which warned Libyan officials not to grant al-Megrahi...
...Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2008. In April 2009, he files another appeal, which he then drops after finding out he has less than three months to live...