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Comment by zerovox | Hacker News Reader

His publishers have the full statement: http://www.littlebrown.co.uk/a-personal-statment-iain-banks....

Damn, this sounds like a Klatskin tumor, a "rare" cancer. My father hat that kind of tumor as well. He died within 8 weeks of first developing jaundice.

Let's stop trying to make people click on cheery-colored buttons and do something about this fucking disease instead.

Getting rich and improving the economy is almost certainly the best thing you can do to combat disease, pollution, poverty, etc.

Or by doing the actual medical research that will fix these problems. Seriously, not everything is solved by money - most is fixed by smart people figuring stuff out. If all the smart people spend their time trying to make money, who is going to do the research?

Indeed. If you stand back far enough the behaviour of humanity seems completely insane. I wish I knew what to do.

Except diseases like cancer are almost exclusive to "western" society. The more affluent we become, the more cancer and other non-contagious diseases we get.

We are killing ourselves and it starts with the stuff our mothers eat, is made worse by what we eat, and is topped of by the environment we live in.

Err.... no.

It's more prevalent in some societies because we live longer and we don't any longer die of preventable infections.

Our air is cleaner than it's been for a long time. Decent nutrition has never been cheaper or more widely available. Life expectancy has never been longer.

We are not killing ourselves. OK so some are by overeating and doing no exercise, but in general you're talking nonsense.

and we've never ate so many chemical food preservatives, taste modifiers, colourants like we're eating now. we've never been exposed to so much radiations like we are now. mobile phones being the first source. and the list goes on. we definitely are doing something to ourselves.

This doesn't change the fact we're living longer, healthier lives than ever before.

I'm sure there's a lot more that we could be doing, I'm sure that there are things we do that we should stop doing for our own health BUT none of this supports the notion that cancer is a disease of western privilege and we're doing everything wrong. We're doing more right than we've ever done.

and yes i forgot sugar and lifestyle

Actually, you need to do cohort analysis to see the risks in different age ranges rather than generalizing.

People in older baby boomer cohorts are doing better than younger generations.

"Decent nutrition has never been cheaper or more widely available."

Sugar/fat has also never been cheaper or more widely available.

Cancer isn't even remotely exclusive to western society. You don't think there's a cancer cost to the fact that 36% of Japanese men smoke?

In Japan, their cancer rate per 100,000 is 1/4 lower than in the US, but that isn't close to the claimed exclusivity. 220 per 100k in Japan versus 300 per 100k in the US.

In S.Korea, it's 260 per 100k, for a mere 13% variance.

How come the Chinese live seven years less than the supposedly cancerous and diseased French in the west? Shouldn't the eastern lifestyle make the Chinese live a lot longer?

Your claim about exclusivity isn't supported by the data. Affluence doesn't correlate to cancer, in fact it's the exact opposite: on average rich people live a lot longer, live healthier, and get cancer less frequently than poor people. In the west, cancer has a high correlation to both obesity and poverty.

Your right. I shouldn't have said "exclusive". I shouldn't be posting when I'm sick. Mea culpa.

Instead, what I should have said is, cancer rates are significantly higher in "western" countries and certain kinds of cancers have seen dramatic increases, such as breast cancer[1] and prostate cancer[2], as countries have "westernized". As countries westernize, rates of these cancers increase.

1. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...

2. http://www.healthandenvironment.org/prostate_cancer/peer_rev...

Or perhaps western medicine is better at detecting those diseases.

Japan is basically Eastern genetics with Eastern diet and Western medicine, right? And a few very "Western" cultural trends (lots of work/high stress, smoking, etc.).

(The irony is that smoking is more on the rise in Asia/etc. than elsewhere, so at some point smoking and related illness will be a non-Western thing, too.)

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