CANCER AND THE ENVIRONMENT?

Today's K-W Record carrys an article about cancer rates and prevalence. The title is "Cancer prevalence rates up due to aging population". This is one of those times when I'm particularily glad that it's a short newspaper article and that I'm able to get a link to it. The reason is that my connection between Cancer and the Environment in my above title is strictly mine. This article does not mention the word environment nor other than normal aging does it give any causes for higher rates of cancer in the population. This I've always found unfortunate because other than obvious lifestyle changes such as stopping smoking, less alcohol, more exercise and losing weight, Canadians are given very little insight into the causes of cancer. My admittedly non medical understanding is that many causes of cancer are one form or another of irritation/inflammation. The obvious example here would be skin cancer from the sun's rays. Similarily lung cancer can be caused by lung irritation from things like nicotine, asbestos and air pollution. Regardless this article which I hope you will read, quite frankly because I had difficulty with it, claims that higher prevalency rates are a mixed blessing. Yes it says more people are getting cancer but importantly more on living with it rather than dying right away. There have been a very few newspaper articles that I've read that bluntly come out and say that the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink is killing us. The reality is that air, food and water are all contaminated by toxic, industrial chemicals. "Experts" however love to reassure us that these toxic chemicals are all below mandated health standards. Individually most may very well be but as I've long said no one has the math or science to be able to determine the health results of multiple chemicals via multiple routes of exposure such as air, water and food. Furthermore even the individual standards are political in nature and the result of biased risk assessments and other mathmatical games.