Cancer is man-made; study reveals

Chamari Senanyake

Cancer affects people at all ages and it cause more than 13percent of all human deaths. Cancers are primarily an environmental disease with 90-95percent of cases due to lifestyle and environmental factors and 5-10percent believed to be due to genetics.

Common environmental factors leading to cancer death include: tobacco (25-30 percent), diet and obesity (30-35 percent), infections (15-20 percent), radiation, stress, physical activity, to environmental pollutants. Not just humans, even animals are affected by cancer.

A recent study has revealed a startling factor about cancer. According to the study, cancer is a man-made disease fuelled by the excesses of modern life. This was a conclusion that was reached after a lengthy study of ancient remains. The study focused on ancient mummies, fossils and even classical literature.

Michael Zimmerman, a visiting professor at Manchester University, said: ‘In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases.

The virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization.’

To trace cancer’s roots, Professor Zimmerman and colleague Rosalie David has analyzed possible references to the disease in classical literature and scrutinized signs in the fossil record and in mummified bodies.

Despite slivers of tissue from hundreds of Egyptian mummies being rehydrated and placed under the microscope, only one case of cancer has been confirmed, which is an extreme rarity as to the number of mummies that did not show any traces of cancer.

They say that this is despite experiments showing that tumours should be even better preserved by mummification than healthy tissues.

The bottom line is that tumors were rare until recent times when pollution and poor diet became issues.

Fossil evidence of cancer is also rare, with scientific literature providing a few dozen, mostly disputed, examples in animal fossil, the journal Nature Reviews Cancer reports. Even the study of Neanderthal bones has provided only one example of a possible cancer. Neanderthals are believed to have vanished around 50,000 years ago paving way to homo sapiens.

Evidence of cancer in ancient Egyptian texts is also ‘tenuous’ with cancer-like problems more likely to have been caused by leprosy or even varicose veins, unlike today’s cases where pollution, radiation taking center stage.

The ancient Greeks were probably the first to define cancer as a specific disease and to distinguish between benign and malignant tumours.

Focusing on this, the Manchester professors said it was unclear if this signaled a real rise in the disease, or just a greater medical knowledge achieved by the Greeks around that time.

The 17th century provides the first descriptions of operations for breast and other cancers.

The very first reports in scientific literature of distinctive tumours (cancers) only occurred in the past 200 years or so, including scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps in 1775 and nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761.

Professor David, who presented the findings to Professor Mike Richards of UK, and other oncologists at a conference earlier this year, said: ‘In industrialized societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death. But in ancient times, it was extremely rare”.

‘There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle” he added.

The professor’s message is that all these historical data taken from various parts of the world proves that cancer is man made and can be and should be addressed.

As scientists often say a healthy diet, regular physical activity and maintaining a healthy weight can prevent about a third of the most common cancers, so this maybe an indication that our ancestors’ possible hardworking lifestyle and healthy environment free of pollution and over population reduced their risk from cancer.