Word: cancerous
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dairies, and within yards of ramshackle slums. On the edges of town, such classic polluters as food-processing and chemical plants dump ! organic wastes, pesticides, solvents and other chemicals into slime-filled ditches that drain into the river. About 100 toxic substances, including mercury and such known or suspected cancer-causing agents as PCBs, toxaphene and benzene have been identified at the border sampling site...
...avoid raising false hopes among cancer victims, researchers tend to use caution in reporting even the most promising advances in treatment for the dread disease. Yet two articles published in last week's New England Journal of Medicine, while containing caveats, seemed reason for guarded optimism. Both dealt with a controversial treatment known as adoptive immunotherapy, which involves the use of a naturally produced substance, interleukin-2 (IL- 2), to bolster a patient's immune system. Both reported striking improvements in some patients with advanced cases of cancer...
...Steven Rosenberg of the National Cancer Institute, a principal author of one of the papers, stressed that the technique "is an experimental treatment in the infancy of its development." Still, he said, "it is a first step in a new direction of cancer therapy. It can work. The challenge is to improve it." In an accompanying editorial, Dr. John Durant of Philadelphia's Fox Chase Cancer Center wrote, "Perhaps we are at the end of the beginning of the search for successful immunotherapy for cancer...
Rosenberg is most widely known as the spokesman for the team of doctors that performed colon surgery on Ronald Reagan in 1985. At a nationally televised press conference he began his remarks with the chilling statement "The President has cancer." But Rosenberg also created news 16 months ago, when he and his NCI team published their initial reports about IL-2 therapy on humans, which the press generally heralded as a cancer "breakthrough...
...results, on a larger test group, confirmed the earlier findings. Rosenberg and his colleagues used the technique on 157 cancer patients with melanoma, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and colorectal, kidney and other cancers that were initially considered untreatable. What is more, the affected tumors were metastatic -- that is, they had spread to other sites in the body. Of the 157 patients, 20 had at least a 50% reduction in tumor size, while complete remissions were produced in nine. (Four patients died from side effects of therapy.) The second paper, by Dr. William West and a team of physicians and scientists...