Word: cancer
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...even those alarming numbers require some perspective. The figures, says PCAST member Dr. Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York and former director of the National Institutes of Health, were generated using data from previous flu pandemics--from 1918, 1957 and 1968--along with the latest data from last spring's outbreaks of H1N1 around the world. Those stats, say officials at the Centers for Disease Control, were then run through models used in the government's 2005 pandemic preparedness efforts that began in the wake of bird flu cases of H5N1 that arose...
...kind of scientific savant the Chinese revere, a techno-geek who scored a Nobel for developing methods of cooling atoms to a few millionths of a degree above absolute zero, who shelved his quantum-physics career to try to save the planet but on weekends still tries to cure cancer with lasers. "In the U.S., rock stars and sports stars are the glamour people. In China, it's scholars," Chu told me during his trip to Beijing. "Here, Nobel laureates are the equivalent of Britney Spears...
...more recent study, published in Cancer Prevention Research, investigators sought to explain another race-based disparity, that whites survive certain head and neck cancers more often than blacks. There was a biological mechanism at play, the authors found: the presence of the sexually transmitted human papilloma virus (HPV), which appeared to protect patients with oropharyngeal cancer. HPV-positive patients had a five times higher rate of cancer survival than HPV-negative patients; as it turned out, whites had a nine times higher rate of HPV infection than blacks, which the researchers believed largely explained the difference in survival...
...difference in HPV infections? It could have to do with the fact that young white men practice oral sex more often and earlier - a common way young people acquire HPV - than black men, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So, with this particular cancer, the survival gap may well be attributed to sociocultural differences in sexual habits, says Brawley, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study. In the hands of another researcher, he says, perhaps these findings would have been chalked up to some unknown biological difference involving race...
...deal? Convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi flew home from a Scottish prison on Thursday, freed by the Scottish government on compassionate grounds because doctors say Megrahi's cancer will kill him within three months. But was that the real reason? Could Britain have traded Megrahi in return for lucrative deals with the energy-rich North African nation...