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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

It’s insane to think that someday humanity will finally find a cure for cancer, and then after all this money and research and struggle people will just… choose not to use it.

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A cure is a treatment, a vaccine is a prophylactic. The most dangerous, by far, cancer that this would help mitigate is cervical cancer which makes up about 0.7% of cancer deaths in the US, exclusively amongst women. The overwhelming majority of cervical cancers occur in Africa due to the fact that HIV/AIDS dramatically increases your susceptibility to developing it.

> The overwhelming majority of cervical cancers occur in Africa due to the fact that HIV/AIDS dramatically increases your susceptibility to developing it.

Considering we're talking about a sexually transmitted disease, the much higher prevalence in Africa of having multiple simultaneous sexual partners is surely relevant.

HPV infections can usually be cleared up by a healthy immune system, so there's a causal relationship with the immune system. There's a lot more information on it available here. [1] Risk factors for it managing to progress onto cancer include obviously the type of HPV infection and "immune status, the presence of other sexually transmitted infections, number of births, young age at first pregnancy, hormonal contraceptive use, and smoking."

I also wonder if 'number of births' is not largely a proxy instead for the shift in the immune system of a woman while pregnant; in effect they tend to become slightly immunocompromised, probably as a means of preventing an immune response from harming the baby.

[1] - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/cervical-ca...

> having multiple simultaneous sexual partners is surely relevant.

medically, not really. the vaccine acts the same. epidemiology wise, it makes it more effective, assuming the correct coverage.

I would just suggest that stating that an entire continent of different races/culture/religions "having multiple simultaneous partners" smells just a little bit of "savages over there", which given that we are talking about _evidence_ based outcomes, jars somewhat.

> medically, not really. the vaccine acts the same.

That's not a response. The multiple simultaneous sexual partners are relevant to the fact that prevalence of the disease in Africa is very high. This is not a vaccine-related question, so the action of the vaccine can't speak to it.

> I would just suggest that stating that an entire continent of different races/culture/religions "having multiple simultaneous partners" smells just a little bit of "savages over there"

Funny, if you look at my comment, you should see that it refers to "the much higher prevalence" of this behavior in Africa.

I do, and I don't see a source. More prevalent in comparison to which other continent? the indian sub continent? south asia?

Does Ghana have a higher or lower prevalence compared to benin, egypt or eritrea?

There will never be a single cure to all cancers. Different cancers have different underlying mechanisms and affect different tissues.

I think this is untrue. All work by uncontrolled replication of cells. This is why nanotechnology had the promise of being able to eliminate cancer - imagine a nano scale robot regularly cycling through your body on occasion, looking for and eliminating cancerous growths.

Drugs, though, probably have very limited potential.

Maybe. The fact that some animals are especially immune to cancers suggest there are ways to prevent the outcome (cell replication/mutation).

Are they immune to cancer, or do they simply not live long enough to develop them? AFAIK, only plants are immune to cancer.

Elephants and naked mole rats.

https://www.sciencealert.com/these-animals-can-t-get-cancer-...

These might not technically be cancers but the similarity is there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burl

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