looking for cancer research: cancer rates from 1860 to now

In 2009 I met Sepp Holzer for the first time.   There was a good crowd.   One day, Sepp was building some stuff and several of us had paid so we could observe.   I attended about 12 days of Sepp's visit.   And there was a woman there that was also attending all 12 days.   I visited with her a bit.   She was a physician from the east coast.  My feeble memory says that she had stepped away from being a physician to Seppify a few thousand acres.  My clear memory is when she made an extremely emphatic point.  She said there is now 400 times more cancer than there was a few hundred years ago.   I said "do you mean 400% more?"  She became angry.  And this is where the massive emphasis was placed, thus making it exceptionally memorable.  400 times more.

400 times more.

400 times more.  

I still hear it ringing in my ears.  

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Decades ago I read a lot of research on how aspartame was quite toxic.  And then I mentioned it online.   I was called a lot of names, thus discrediting my mention.   So I went to find my sources.   Gone.  

We now know to what extreme extent one organization went to to make sure there was nothing published anywhere to suggest their product was anything less than excellent.

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A seller of DE was contacted by the FDA and told that he was being fined $10,000 a day to remove all mention that the same DE was both edible and used as an insecticide.  It was okay, by the FDA, to have one package say "edible" and another say "insecticide" and both packages contain the exact same stuff.  

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From 1984 by George Orwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Smith

Winston Smith works as a clerk in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, where his job is to rewrite historical documents so they match the constantly changing current party line.  

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About five years ago I did some research to find support for the "400 times more".  Not much to go on.   I did find information that there is 12 times more cancer in 2000 as in 1860.   But I cannot find that now.  I did find that the first pediatric oncology unit was created in 1950 (or so) and there are hundreds now - but that might have more to do with business than actual child cancer rates.  But it did seem to me that the rated of child cancers had gone up by more than a factor of 100.   But I can't find that information now.  

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So what I would really like to find is a reference to cancer death per capita in 1860.

Cancer.gov says that for 2011-2015, 163.5 people per 100,000 die of cancer each year.

I suppose the "400" number could be from several hundred years ago.   So if the 1860 number were to be something like "1.6 per 100,000" then it would be fair to say "100 times more since 1860".  

Of course, there are dozens of variables to complicate things.   Somebody could die in 1860 and people would just say "old age" or "poverty" when it could really be cancer.  Or say nothing - that person got sick and died, nobody recorded why they died.

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I should add ... about the doctor at the Sepp event ...   I got the impression that she was extremely disgusted with the corruption in the medical community.  Especially when it came to covering up the dramatic increase in the rate of cancer.  

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I am hoping that by posting this, people can find numbers, somewhere, of cancer deaths per capita per year for a time near 1860.

Anybody?

Whoa, there. 400% or 400 times?

Also, I agree with the idea that it's complicated. What has happened to the mortality rate in that time, and in childhood mortality? What has happened to reporting in that timeframe, vis a vis unexplained death or death by, what was at the time, unexplained issues?

I am not disagreeing with the idea that there could be more cancer today, nor with the idea that the unnecessary additions to our environment and food could be causing higher levels of cancer than previously experienced, but there are many variables that could change cancer rates, and it's important to be specific and thorough in order to determine what's what.

-CK

I think a strong (and scientifically appropriate) correlation can be derived from the amount of carcinogens(in type, proximity to humans, and in amount/time in exposure) present now vs any set time in the past.

Go back far enough in time to have only naturally occurring carcinogens, and the list goes down to probably <50 (UV, woodsmoke, radon, radioactive elements, a few certain mineral and plant compounds).  

The important factor would be the ability to diagnose cancers where they were previously unrecognized.  Like many diseases and disorders which have exponentially increasing rates of diagnosis, the difference may be in diagnostic ability and not necessarily actual incidence.  It's hard to say what the actual incidence was 100 years ago for many cancers, when diagnostic tools and treatments were nonexistent or vastly inaccessible, in comparison to today when technology has advanced and many places have publicly funded healthcare services.  There are probably research estimates made in vastly differing expert opinions, which would be challenged without recorded evidence.  Intuitively we have massively higher rates of exposure to carcinogens that weren't invented in 1860, anyway, so even the non expert opinion would lean toward increased risk without evidence of incidence, if that's part of the research goal.  The cumulative biological and environmental chemical load is terrifying, and that might be measured archaeologically in the case of some chemicals.

I wonder if it would be helpful to look at specific incidence in research done in countries where heavy industrial development is more recent than advanced western medical intervention, if there is such a place that would be a good example?

It's not quite what you're looking for, but here's a website for causes of death in the UK over a 100 year period with charts which show cause of death in different age cohorts over that 100 years.  It looks like there is a horrific rise in cancer in recent years, because in the early years of that 100 year period vast numbers of people were dying of infectious diseases which are now mostly eradicated.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/causesofdeathover100years/2017-09-18

Interesting that there's a jump between age 14 and age 29 -- the period of life when the physical body and immune system are at their strongest -- when cancer almost disappears as a cause of death.

Part of the increase on that chart can be accounted for by simple longevity. During the early 1900's, most people died young compared to today, but those who did live into their later years tended to be centenarians. But the fact that cancer far outranks every other cause of death is telling. Now people tend to live longer in general, resulting in higher incidents of many diseases once considered rare.

In regards to lack of reporting, most doctors would have noticed and the incidence of "other" causes of death would have been much higher even if the doctors didn't recognize cancer as such. The lack of reporting would have stretched across all causes of death, not just those the doctor didn't recognize. If a doctor tended to not report the cause of death, he usually didn't report across the board.

I have also noticed incidents where I went looking for information previously found (often screen-shotted or references noted) and was unable to find them. The cloud is NOT forever if someone wants to remove the information.

Per my pathophys course, cancer is primarily a disease of aging because the more times a cell replicates the more likely it is to “ screw up” and have an error. As you age, the immune system is also not as effective which increases the chance of your body “ missing” the cancerous cell. Add in genetic factors and of course increased incidence of carcinogen exposure and there is definitely no doubt that there is more cancer now than in the 1860s. But as others have pointed out, it would be incredibly difficult to see epidemiology numbers from 1860 as being accurate. I doubt your average doc was diagnosing childhood leukemia and as far as adult cancers, some are still incredibly difficult to find/ diagnose even now ( considering the alcohol and tobacco consumption I’m betting many people died of pancreatic cancer back in the day for one).  I think “400 times more” is likely somewhat of an ass pull when it comes to pure science.


ETA: I left out that obesity heavily correlates as well, which is not something our ancestors suffered a lot of. Also vivisection was still pretty controversial and rare during Victorian times I think, which would make post mortem dx even more prone to error.vDigging around the library I came across this little gem too "Noting that cancer mortality was on the rise among men, a late-19th-century writer argued that “want of proper exercise, and excess of food” were emasculating men and leaving them subject to “women’s diseases."  

This one is specific to liver cancer, and covers only the years 2000 through 2016 -- an effective increase in liver cancer deaths of over 40% in that 16 year period. Increase in deaths, not increase in incidents.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db314.htm

"Age-adjusted death rates for liver cancer increased 43%, from 10.5 per 100,000 U.S. standard population to 15.0 for men and 40%, from 4.5 to 6.3 for women, between 2000 and 2016.
During 2000–2016, liver cancer death rates decreased 22% for non-Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander (API) adults, but increased 48% for non-Hispanic white, 43% for non-Hispanic black, and 27% for Hispanic adults.
Trends in liver cancer death rates varied by age group, but increasing trends from 2000 through 2016 were observed for adults aged 65–74 and 75 and over.
In 2016, among the 50 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.), D.C. had the highest death rate while Vermont had the lowest.
Liver cancer (including intrahepatic bile duct cancer) was the ninth leading cause of cancer death in 2000 and rose to sixth in 2016 (1). Although death rates for all cancer combined have declined since 1990, a recent report documented an increasing trend in liver cancer death rates during 1990–2014 (2,3). In this report, trends in liver cancer death rates are examined by sex, race and Hispanic origin, and age group from 2000 through 2016 for adults aged 25 and over. Death rates in 2016 by state and the District of Columbia (D.C.) are also presented."

Check out the book 'Dirty Electricity' for lots of great statistical info, graphs and charts

exploring the correlation between the roll out of the electric grid in the US, the mass movement from rural areas to the cities,

and the 'diseases of civilization'- not just cancer but alzhiemers, dementia, depression and a few others.

Best resource what you're looking for I've so far found.

Noah Fours wrote:Check out the book 'Dirty Electricity' for lots of great statistical info, graphs and charts

exploring the correlation between the roll out of the electric grid in the US, the mass movement from rural areas to the cities,

and the 'diseases of civilization'- not just cancer but alzhiemers, dementia, depression and a few others.

Best resource what you're looking for I've so far found.

Do you have the book?  Are these numbers there, or is it more of a "might be there"?

I do not have the book- and it's been about 3 years from when I read it last.

I did take some notes- when I unpack my massive backpack after flying to canada I'll see what I find.

Here's a link to a non-complete google books upload "https://books.google.com/books?id=qfNoYRQ37soC&pg=PA73&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false"


From the research I've done so far, which is extensive, on the topic of human health, and specifically on the impact of the modern lifestyle on human physiology, I think the doctor in your first post is probably not far off the mark with 400x more cancer.

As far as the numbers being there or not there- They show a direct 1 to 1 correlation between the introduction of the electric grid into new rural areas and the simultaneous rise in diseases in that area that before had little to no history of occurrence.   I can't remember what the earliest date is from- though I believe it starts around 1900 or maybe 1880.

You might want to do some research into the prevalence of cancer in traditional Native American societies. Or even in modern, isolated, primitive people- to get an idea.  


On a similar note- Are you familiar with Weston A Prices Nutrition and Physical Degeneration? Along the same lines- Though here the subject matter is instances of cavities, ease of childbirth, dental arch form and general physique- his findings are in a nutshell across the board that those groups relying entirely on traditional food (no refined sugar, processed anything) were in excellent health, but the minute that modern foods were introduced, all kinds of problems start cropping up. He goes into extreme detail, but it's enough to say here that basically, our modern diet is making us sick and causing birth defects and mental retardation. No surprise there.

The mainstream mindset surrounding Cancer (and nearly every disease of civilization) is to put a massive amount of energy into promoting "Search for the Cure!' Without doing any looking for the causes.

Finding the information your looking for is complicated by this- because It's not just Cell phone towers and wifi, it's the 60hz ELF from the wiring in your house, its the mercury in your amalgam fillings, its the ten billion other known carcinogens and the fact that most people havent actually eaten a meal that doesnt include processed foods and genetically modified corn in their entire lives.  

To quote from a documentary I saw a few years ago ( called beings of frequency, free on youtube, great watch super informative) The electromagnetic climate of our planet (meaning, the amount and strength of frequnecies bouncing around) has increased by over 5 million percent since the year 1950.

The question that I think might help you wrap your head around the possibility of a 400 time increase is this.

Have we as a species ever invented a new technology, and then chose not to use it if it made our lives easier in anyway, because of the impact it might have on our health or environment?

Paul, as others have pointed out, this is a very hard apples to dump trucks comparison.

Average life expectancy in 1870 (the earliest reliable data I could find) was under 40 years in the US. Cancer is still very rare after childhood but before that age. So small numerators and big denominators.

Secondly, there were no pathologists to diagnose cancer, it was founded in Europe around then. That field was developing massively in the early 20th century, and not really formalized much until the middle of the century with residency. Most of the time surgeons did their own studies much like vets do, and there were only a few tests they could really run. Fine optics were not available to look at characteristics of cells until the early 20th century and prior most diagnosis was gross diagnosis only.

Thirdly, medicine was a mix of three different philosophies- homeopathy, surgery, and (in the US) osteopathy in the late 19th/early 20th century. It much more resembled what people here discuss with herbal and folk remedies than modern pharma-based and inpatient hospitals. There were only a handful of medications, and surgery was pretty much considered butchery until the development of anesthesia in the mid 1800s. It wasn't widely available until the late 1800s, so surgeons were mostly dealing with amputations like in wild west movies with alcohol, a sharp blade, and if you were lucky some morphine. There were pockets of proto-modern medicine in New England and a few other places in Europe.

So in order to diagnose cancer you generally need a specimen (generally from surgery at this point), a pathologist, and a patient with cancer. It would not surprise me if there is 400 times more diagnosed cancer now than in 1860. But that is a separate question from whether there is more development of cancer now than in 1860.

I agree with you, Tj.

If we look at the coloured graphic above, the increase in number of deaths by cancer is clearly on the rise. It also shows how infection used to be the big killer, followed in time by heart disease, and for a brief span of decades, motor vehicle accidents.

It only makes sense that, as we pare away at the low-hanging mortality fruit, doing away with infection with hygiene and antibiotics, educating people about proper heart health and developing cardiac medicine and drugs, minimising vehicular mortality by increasing safety measures, that those diseases that aren't as easily managed become more numerous as a function of total mortality; more people are living long enough to develop cancer. Also, more children who would have been killed in childhood are surviving. Part of it is just a numbers game.

Though I will not dispute the idea that much of what we do might be more likely to cause cancer. The Standard American Diet contains too many processed goods masquerading as food, and the way even organic food is grown these days, if it conforms to the standard of conventional agriculture, renders it empty of much nutrition.

The idea about the electric grid is interesting, and I wouldn't be surprised if, to continue to use electricity safely, we eventually need to develop adequate EM shielding technology, or build faraday cages into our walls. But I would also look at what offgasses during the life of an electric system in a house, specifically from the insulation used on the wires.

I would also look at the changes that accompanied electrification into those communities. Were they also introduced to lead paint, or asbestos tiles? There are just so many variables that it's difficult to say with any certainty.

-CK

Norma Guy wrote:The important factor would be the ability to diagnose cancers where they were previously unrecognized.  Like many diseases and disorders which have exponentially increasing rates of diagnosis, the difference may be in diagnostic ability and not necessarily actual incidence.  It's hard to say what the actual incidence was 100 years ago for many cancers, when diagnostic tools and treatments were nonexistent or vastly inaccessible, in comparison to today when technology has advanced and many places have publicly funded healthcare services.  There are probably research estimates made in vastly differing expert opinions, which would be challenged without recorded evidence.  Intuitively we have massively higher rates of exposure to carcinogens that weren't invented in 1860, anyway, so even the non expert opinion would lean toward increased risk without evidence of incidence, if that's part of the research goal.  The cumulative biological and environmental chemical load is terrifying, and that might be measured archaeologically in the case of some chemicals.

I was going to mention this.

I was also going to mention that humans are living WAY longer which gives the body way more time to find ways to kill us. ;)

There have been many good points made already about why such a long-term comparison is difficult (medical terminology and capability, prevalence of other diseases, etc), but I'd like to add that you shouldn't underestimate past exposure to carcinogens: ventilation inside houses was generally poor, food was regularly adulterated, moldy or otherwise contaminated, lead was generally used for pipelines or to line water containers, medicine often consisted of heavy metals such as antimony or mercury, industrial standards were pretty much nonexistent, and so on and so on.

Difficult to assess quantitatively, but medical writers always have had plenty to say about 'malignant growths' - not a recent phenomenon at all.

Dropping some relevant funds from the inter webs that might help:

This article takes you back 2300 years and then works it forward. The answer isn’t directly stated but can be extrapolated as to why the number has increased dramatically in the last 30 years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK20362/

This article will give you deeper statistics about what’s happened in the last 30 years. https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/statistics

Hope these help.

Given all the good points about cancer research in 1860 being crude and limited and so, deficient for comparison, I did find this :
1842 - ITALY
Domenico Antonio Rigoni-Stern undertook the first major statistical analysis of cancer incidence and mortality using 1760–1839 data from Verona. This showed that more women than men died from tumors, and that the most common female cancers were breast and uterine (each accounting for a third of total deaths). He found cancer death rates for both sexes were rising, and concluded that incidence of cancer increases with age, that cancer is found less in the country than in the city, and that unmarried people are more likely to contract the disease.
as well as
Before 1900
Lung cancer was extremely rare; now it is one of the most common cancers.

at this URL - http://canceratlas.cancer.org/history-cancer/19th-century/

In support of a number of the previous comments, this paper visits the "unqualified" use of papers like Rigoni-Stern's study of 1842 as an "anchor" for more modern thinking on a given subject, despite radical changes in the research processes, in this case, cancer -
The little death: Rigoni-Stern and the problem of sex and cancer in 20th-century biomedical research.
Aviles NB.
Abstract
Approaches to the organization and conduct of cancer research changed dramatically throughout the 20th century. Despite marked differences between the epidemiological approaches of the first half of the century and molecular techniques that gained dominance in the 1980s, prominent 20th-century researchers investigating the link between sexual activity and anogenital cancers continuously invoked the same 1842 treatise by Italian surgeon Domenico Rigoni-Stern, who is said to originate the problem of establishing a causal link between sex and cancer. In this article, I investigate 20th-century references to Rigoni-Stern as a case of a broader phenomenon: scientists situating their work through narratives of venerated ancestors, or originators. By explaining shifting versions of originator narratives in light of their authors' cultural context and research practices, we can reimagine as meaningful cultural symbols the references that previous scholars have treated as specious rhetorical maneuvers. In this case, references to Rigoni-Stern provide an interpretive anchor for American scientists to construct continuity between their work and a diverse historical legacy of cancer research.

PMID: 26477198
DOI: 10.1177/0306312715584402

I also found the American Cancer Society's Facts & Figures for 2019 @ https://www.cancer.org/content/dam/cancer-org/research/cancer-facts-and-statistics/annual-cancer-facts-and-figures/2019/cancer-facts-and-figures-2019.pdf

Questions that have to be considered are
1) proportionality - Is an increase in numbers of cancer cases proportionate to the increase in population overall, whatever the sample used?
2) improvements - Have the statistics been adjusted to reflect improved cancer detection and assessment?
3) data quality - Do the statistics reflect the changes in quality of cancer diagnostic data over time?
4) data equivalency - does data collected in 1820 have the same weight as data collected in 1920 or as in 2019?  When did data collection start?

In essence has all the data been normalized and how? Have environmental considerations and daily life conditions been evaluated for the target population?

These are all important for the reasons stated in -
Incidence and Mortality Data

Mortality data from 1930 to 2016 were provided by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).1-3 Forty‐seven states and the District of Columbia met data quality requirements for reporting to the national vital statistics system in 1930, and Texas, Alaska, and Hawaii began reporting in 1933, 1959, and 1960, respectively. The methods for abstraction and age adjustment of historic mortality data are described elsewhere.3, 4 Five‐year mortality rates (2011‐2015) for Puerto Rico were previously published in volume 3 of the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries’ (NAACCR’s) Cancer in North America: 2011‐2015.5

Population‐based cancer incidence data in the United States have been collected by the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI’s) Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program since 1973 and by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC’s) National Program of Cancer Registries (NPCR) since 1995. The SEER program is the only source for historic population‐based incidence data. Long‐term (1975–2015) incidence and survival trends were based on data from the 9 oldest SEER areas (Connecticut, Hawaii, Iowa, New Mexico, Utah, and the metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Detroit, San Francisco–Oakland, and Seattle–Puget Sound), representing approximately 9% of the US population.6, 7 The lifetime probability of developing cancer and contemporary stage distribution and survival statistics were based on data from all 18 SEER registries (the SEER 9 registries plus Alaska Natives, California, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and New Jersey), covering 28% of the US population.8 The probability of developing cancer was calculated using NCI’s DevCan software (version 6.7.6).9 Some of the statistical information presented herein was adapted from data previously published in the SEER Cancer Statistics Review 1975‐2015.10

The NAACCR compiles and reports incidence data from 1995 onward for registries that participate in the SEER program and/or the NPCR. These data approach 100% coverage of the US population for the most recent years and were the source for the projected new cancer cases in 2019 and cross‐sectional incidence rates by state and race/ethnicity.11, 12 Some of the incidence data presented herein were previously published in volumes 1 and 2 of Cancer in North America: 2011‐2015.13, 14

All cancer cases were classified according to the International Classification of Diseases for Oncology except childhood and adolescent cancers, which were classified according to the International Classification of Childhood Cancer (ICCC).15, 16 Causes of death were classified according to the International Classification of Diseases.17 All incidence and death rates were age standardized to the 2000 US standard population and expressed per 100,000 population, as calculated by NCI’s SEER*Stat software (version 8.3.5).18 The annual percent change in rates was quantified using NCI’s Joinpoint Regression Program (version 4.6.0).19

Whenever possible, cancer incidence rates were adjusted for delays in reporting, which occur because of a lag in case capture or data corrections. Delay‐adjustment has the largest effect on the most recent data years for cancers that are frequently diagnosed in outpatient settings (eg, melanoma, leukemia, and prostate cancer) and provides the most accurate portrayal of cancer occurrence in the most recent time period.20 For example, the leukemia incidence rate for 2015 in the 9 oldest SEER registries was 12% higher after adjusting for reporting delays (15.2 vs 13.6 per 100,000 population).10

which can be found @ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3322/caac.21551

So, without doing all the research myself, there was no immediate up-front validation for that figure. It would seem to be very difficult to make a statement like that without having established that increase as empirical fact in some specific population, and then having sufficient justification to extrapolate that to the entire human population. This doesn't seem very likely given the overall points brought up in my searches and here in this thread.

Hope this helps.

Here's an excerpt from https://ggenereux.blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/PoisoningForProfits.pdf (well worth reading, along with https://ggenereux.blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/extinguishing-the-fires-of-hell2.pdf -- both are free downloads):

"Cancer rates in 1860 in Western Europe were around 1 in 10,000 (33) . But
now in North America the life time incidence rates are nearly 1 in 2 for
men, and 1 in 3 for women.

(33)Disease Maps: Epidemics on the Ground, By Tom Koch, University of Chicago Press,
Jun 30, 2011 - History - 330 pages"

The source is footnoted; you can perhaps consult the Koch work for details. Used copies are cheap: https://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0226449351/ref=dp_olp_used?ie=UTF8&condition=used

Victor,

this sounds like it will work:

Our cancer rates are
also like 50 and 200 times higher too. Since the 1860s our cancer rates
have jumped to being between 500 to 1000 times higher now too. Just to
be very clear, that’s not 500 to 1,000% higher. No, it’s a whopping
50,000% to 100,000% higher. In the context of recent history, say over the
last 100 years or so, the rates of the “autoimmune” diseases in North
America are easily now 500 times higher too.  

Yeah, the guy started with autoimmune/alzheimers statistics and then found the same phenomenon with regard to cancer. Rates back in the third world "shitholes" are down where ours used to be. Maybe we should move...

His ebooks are great, and I think he may be onto something with the chronic vitamin A toxicity theory. He was able to fix himself, anyway, after the establishment gave him about five more years with chronic kidney disease. Now he's fine, and my results are impressing me too.

paul wheaton wrote:Victor,

this sounds like it will work:

Our cancer rates are
also like 50 and 200 times higher too. Since the 1860s our cancer rates
have jumped to being between 500 to 1000 times higher now too. Just to
be very clear, that’s not 500 to 1,000% higher. No, it’s a whopping
50,000% to 100,000% higher. In the context of recent history, say over the
last 100 years or so, the rates of the “autoimmune” diseases in North
America are easily now 500 times higher too.  

Maybe it would help to  focus on the more recent increases in cancer incidence? Differences in life expectation and living conditions would not be such an issue.

I found this article, from 2008, it's free:

Global cancer statistics

Unfortunately I don't have online access to university libraries so my searches are limited to free papers/ abstracts of other papers.

I hope this helps at least a little!

So who is the guy Victor quoted? What are his sources? I had a bit of trouble tracking it down within the thread (I see Pauls quote, but not the original), and I’d be interested in seeing his primary data. Given what everyone else in this thread has posted, and the sensational language of the paragraph, I’d like to know where he got his numbers from.

Ok- I see - it us from the links, and the source is the koch book, right?
I’ll definitely have to check out the source.
1984 quotes notwithstanding, if that number is correctly pulled from established and accepted sources, I truly feel like it would be splashed over the internet. There are plenty if people upset about pesticides, gmos, air pollution, you name it. But, maybe I’m wrong.

Nina Jay wrote:I found this article, from 2008, it's free:

Global cancer statistics

I couldn't get the link to work.  ??

I probably messed it up somehow when trying to link it here. I'll try again:
Global cancer statistics

Here's the link as plain text just in case

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.3322/caac.20107

Yes, that's right; the Koch book was footnoted in the ebook. I have no idea how reliable it is, but the original source may give some context.

Lina Joana wrote:Ok- I see - it us from the links, and the source is the koch book, right?
I’ll definitely have to check out the source.
1984 quotes notwithstanding, if that number is correctly pulled from established and accepted sources, I truly feel like it would be splashed over the internet. There are plenty if people upset about pesticides, gmos, air pollution, you name it. But, maybe I’m wrong.

I have argued with a few people at length about this question of cancer rates. Good guy progressives, including a molecular biologist P.H.D, all of federal faith, I found them clinging to FDA assertions of safe exposure levels.

I had to tell even the 34 year old doctor 3 times before it registered, the point about all these safety assertions being more or less hypothetical due to the fact that many of these "safe at X PPM chemicals" are "probable insidious poisons" because these chemicals are tested for some measurable effect individually, and then in virtually all non-laboratory applications, immune systems are interacting with cocktails of not one novel environmentally introduced mutagen, but hundreds of them, and that in combination they interact and change the way the immune system can handle them.  The analytical study of biology and health with regard to immune system interactions is a ways up shit creek without a paddle, due to the complexity of the system.  

As far as trying to get something like "true cancer rates" over the past century or more, like with a scientifically rigorous statistics and measure....I don't think they exist.   Tracking this over the course of many decades is statistical speculation, because there is no solid measure of two critical unknowns which were mentioned here;

The first unknown being that, as life expectancy increases due to declining deaths by infectious disease and violence and young deaths etc, deaths due to old age and degenerative disease (and cancer) will increase.  Getting some value for this adjustment has hardly been attempted, because you could spend a huge amount of research energy and you would come up with an educated guess at best.  Like, first adjust for the deaths by lung and stomach cancers plummeting over the past century, which was primarily caused by a decline in smoking and drinking and salted meat-eating habits in that period.  Ummm, so how might that change of habits effect the rates of these other cancers which were increasing over that period?  That's one of probably a few dozen adjustments you'd need in order to get some idea of precisely how much more cancer you should expect as a result of people tending to live a few decades longer over this period.   The accuracy of each one of these adjustments which you could sic a team of statistical researchers on is not something you can theoretically test, as these are not phenomena you can recreate in a lab, and nobody has all the data.  

Then add the 2nd unknown, the rate of diagnosis of cancer.  

When the rate of cancer is changing due to changes in life expectancy, and you compound this with the further unknown of the rate of cancer diagnosis, you've got a statistical clusterf#$%; value unknown, cannot reproduce in a lab to test any hypothesis, nobody has all the necessary data, all is speculation.

I accepted this at the P.H.D's behest, and he finally accepted that nobody has much of a clue as to what they are talking about with regard to the long term safety of "metagenic cocktails" the modern environment is commonly flooded with. He also kept repeating those two talking points, that cancer rates were only increasing because people were living longer, and the rate of diagnosis changes.  

He kept repeating those points, because if the cancer rate is increasing due to environmental changes, it then contradicts his assertion of the "primarily baseline genetic chaos" cause of cancer.  He clings to this explanation probably because he works in a genetics lab studying neurological disorders, where they are also "proving" the "primarily baseline genetic chaos" cause of neurological disorders  (ASD and others.)  I came up with an idea in arguing with him, that mutagens can and do act on gametes, thus the mutations are in like every cell of the resulting fetus, and should said fetus survive to make babies, these mutations induced by environmentally introduced mutagens (what a mouthful...) are fully heritable, thus the "Autism Twin's Study" he pointed to as "proof of genetic cause due to inheritance" does not actually prove a genetic cause.  

Even though he then accepted that the Twins study doesn't necessarily prove anything with regard to concept, he still does not think it's likely that the mutations they are tracking are the result heritable, environmentally-introduced mutagenic activity.   I do not understand the reasons he gives as the basis for this thinking.  It seems this debate is stuck in a "chicken or the egg argument" for lack of data...

Another trap, modern progressive chemical defenders will use the falling rates of "deaths by cancer" as a way to show that the cancer rate is not increasing.  You'll probably have to point out that "Deaths by cancer" have been decreasing in recent decades due to changing treatment success, but that the "rate of cancer malignant or benign" is not so decreasing.







I finally got this weasel PHD and his oh-so scientifically righteous cohorts to second guess their cancer-rate thinking with the following bits and pieces;

The first step was the question, would you say there is probably no significant change in the rate of diagnosis of cancers from 2017 to 2018?  

To which they agreed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-life-expectancy-declines-again-a-dismal-trend-not-seen-since-world-war-i/2018/11/28/ae58bc8c-f28c-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.htm

(Not all that relevant to ongoing cancer talk, but note how the WP goes on about suicide and opioid overdose, and how these things are contributing to about 40/100,000 deaths.  Case closed!  LOL)

https://www.statista.com/statistics/274513/life-expectancy-in-north-america/


https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts-statistics/all-cancer-facts-figures/cancer-facts-figures-2017.html

https://www.cancer.org/research/cancer-facts-statistics/all-cancer-facts-figures/cancer-facts-figures-2018.html


So I think the US census places population, 2018 to 2017 ratio (327,167,434/325,719,178) gives ~0.4% increase

reported cases of cancer 2018 to 2017 ratio (1,735,350/1,685,210) gives ~2.9% increase

This happened in a year where the life expectancy of both sexes decreased by about a tenth of a year for the second year in a row.

To wit, I asked them "how many years can that happen before you'll give up this idea that "cancer rates are increasing because life expectancy is increasing" as nonsense wishful thinking?

Mr. Scientist's response was:

I don't know

not many lol




That's the report, maybe you'll find it useful

https://www.radiologic.theclinics.com/article/S0033-8389(12)00123-6/abstract

I wrote up something yesterday, then thought it was going in a nonhelpful direction. I think this is better. This is based on well accepted Levels of Evidence used in journals as a jumping off point. Sometimes they are labelled A through E or whatever, with A being the most reliable study design and likely "proof".

Who is your target audience? This is the Dale Carnegie thing...

If your audience is the Dr Mercola crowd, they will agree with the hypothesis. Pick a number. I have several in my family that probably have read the Vitamin A paper and thought "this makes total sense". They are already convinced of the truth in the hypothesis. This includes the new media types like Joe Rogan, who have more influence than people think in the Millenial generation and whatever the even younger ones are called, and are just looking for something to fill an hour and get clicks. These people will believe the earth is a disc if their influencer says so. 20% of the population, skewing young. These people got burned by the Fyre festival. Level of evidence E.

If your audience is the Yahoo Health crowd (or whatever people read now), then I would pick a number that seems like it might have some real chance of being tested and proven from citable sources. something with a PMID is all you need in a footnote. No one will read the primary source. This includes the majority of the population, the Whole Foods and Walmart USDA organic people, and makes the zeitgeist do its thing. This is the people who watch eight TED talks in a sitting too. Level of evidence D, maybe C. Just make sure there is no clear disprovable fact. These people got burned by Cold Fusion.

Third is people who are skeptically reading science stuff and have been burned by, let's say, a foundational belief in basic genetics versus epigenetics. Or industrial smarter ag versus beyond organic. The level of proof this group will accept is much higher. I haven't seen anything in cancer rates on here that will change the PhD's mind. There are too many variables to make a high level of evidence. Sometimes they will be convinced outside their field by a lower level of evidence of it affects them. An example, I know a good scientist who had a kid that is autistic. Previously, she was a big-time vaxxer, now she is a vehement anti-vaxxer. She doesn't know more than a layman about vaccinations (not close to her field), but she can read stuff, and she reads things from Mercola, because we all want deep down to not have our vulnerabilities exposed. If autism is genetic, she is exposed as passing on the genes. Twin studies are as good evidence as you can get for autism, but any study has unexamined confounders. The Vitamin A guy strikes me as the same type, I can poke all kinds of holes in his hypothesis but it would be a personal attack on him, because it means he has a disease not a conspiracy. These people are the keepers of the orthodoxy. They change peripherally, then all of a sudden the paradigm changes. I don't know how to support your hypothesis with this group. I would suggest targeting the middle group. Eventually they determine the Overton Window.

Intresting topic! We just discussed yesterday if cancer rate has increased and yes,it seems so.In my family there are two close relatives with C.I remembered for not more than 50 years ago that C was rather unusual and when somebody hsve C everybody in 50 miles surrounding knew it and it was a death sentence.But it is difficult to know how much C rates has grown since 1860.As somebody wrote here;C comes with age and we are getting older and older so it is a good idea to start comparing the changes in cancer rates between 1970 and until today.
Another important thing is that we were about 7.6 billions on the earth 2018 but only 1.8 billions in the 1850's.

First of all, Paul, I could be that doctor, I'm so disgusted with everything having to do with our agricultural, medical, financial, legal, and political systems in the US I could spit. Actually, I intend to leave the country for good very shortly, but that's for another thread.

I'm curious, why is any of this of any importance to anyone? The chemicals that they have dumped everywhere, and continue to dump, are deadly, what more do you need to know. The world according to Monsanto, DuPont, Dow, et al, is so completely contaminated with so-called "empirical" BS that they have created that there is hardly a point in trying to sift through it. The difference between 100% and 1000% would be of no value except as propaganda, and that's not where our energies are best spent. Like the famous old racist, Dr. Albert Schweitzer said, "make your life your argument". Continue to share and try to educate at least one new person every day and eventually the worm turns, as it has been doing for the last 50 years or so.

One of my best friends was a big deal economist at the CDC, who ironically died from pancreatic cancer at the ripe old age of 55, and he is one of six friends who died before the median from that same previously unusual cancer that I know, along with all three of the "conventional" orchardists that I knew, along with half of their immediate families, of non-Hodgkins lymphoma and other blood-related cancers. We live in the middle of one of the most heavily agriculturally sprayed areas in the country, where cancer IS the predominant killer, but even the County level health authorities bulk at the idea of collecting and correlating any hard data on the scourge.

While transporting friends and neighbors to various health care facilities outside of our third world, here on the Delmarva Peninsula, I've heard tell in every cancer treatment provider in our region that they have become so familiar with these cancers from the shore that they have literally begun referring to them as "Farmer Cancer". The FAA, who issues the flight permits to the aerial applicators, before they get their meaningless State license (simply a revenue mechanism for the State, but no real regulation or attention is paid to anything that these asses do) refer to the pesticides collectively in their own code as "Economic Poisons". WTF else do you need to know?

This notion that we need to support common effing sense with empirical absolutisms that do not exist in order to somehow validate our reasoning is absurd! The focus should be to do whatever we can to force these chemical and drug manufacturers to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that anything and everything that they want to sell is 100% guaranteed NOT to cause any harm, but they cannot and will not do that, so they must be shut down, and that requires political change, not another status quo jackass interested in promoting their party's power while stuffing their pockets with both hands.

When the masters of the money can buy whatever political and judicial influence that they desire, is it any wonder that they find it so easy to take over the land grant universities and control every aspect of the academic bullshit that they produce. Real science is for all intents and purposes dead with regard to anything having to do with environmental or health impact of drugs and chemicals, or the entire energy sector, the military industrial complex, mining, and manufacturing in general. So what is the point of searching out the third type of lie?

As for the idea of trying to somehow qualify and quantify all of the innumerable variables affecting your desired statistics, and then trying to somehow accurately correlate those factors with some undefined period in the past, are you kidding me? What exactly is your ultimate point?

Life's too short. Go plant a tree and teach someone how to care for it - time better spent. Cognitive dissonance and the natural inertia of the apathetic are not going to be noticeably deflected in the least by a presentment of statistics, so the only people who might embrace the outcome will likely be the echo chamber that requires no convincing. As Mr. Sagan once said,

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

So we're better off setting a good example and offering to educate while the herd continues to thin as a result of their having fully embraced the bamboozle. Let Darwinism run its course and hopefully what survives will be worth your effort.

Chris Kott wrote:Whoa, there. 400% or 400 times?

Also, I agree with the idea that it's complicated. What has happened to the mortality rate in that time, and in childhood mortality? What has happened to reporting in that timeframe, vis a vis unexplained death or death by, what was at the time, unexplained issues?

I am not disagreeing with the idea that there could be more cancer today, nor with the idea that the unnecessary additions to our environment and food could be causing higher levels of cancer than previously experienced, but there are many variables that could change cancer rates, and it's important to be specific and thorough in order to determine what's what.

-CK

Could be causing higher levels of cancer?!

Here are some variables for ya; everything that you eat impacts your gut biome, which is your immune system, so how do you adjust for just the variety of diets? Once our DNA has mutated through successive generations of breeding the new mutations are now reflectant of a completely different species. We see it happen in just a matter of two or three generations of grazing animals, where those born of feedlot animals are never able to thrive anywhere near the degree to which their pure pasture reared cousins do, so how do you correlate that? Vegan, organic, fast food junkie... and what about the impotent diabetics who are more regularly going to continue to under-represent in terms of their subsequent progeny? A necrotic Willy does not an off-spring make, no matter how many little blue pills and pumps are involved. So just on that basis alone, we apples to the oranges that were our great great grandparents, so what's the point?

We're much, much better at killing brown and black and yellow skinned people than we used to be (although we had already managed a pretty thorough job of irradicating red), so how do we account for that? WWI was a man-made a tragedy, but it could be argued that so was the Spanish flu that partnered with it. War created the circumstances that promoted its growth and spread, but of course, war-time propaganda also makes it impossible to assess any real data since the governments involved couldn't afford for their populations to know the truth of just how many folks were dying. Had they realized that without firing a shot 5% of their numbers would perish, they might not have been as willing to be led off of that cliff. From there WWII was just a continuation of the first, but how could one possibly collect and correlate any kind of relevant data from the period when whole swaths of a single gender were wiped out in some cultures, and select ethnicities from others?

What does remain as incontrovertible truth is that we are sick and dying, of things that DO absolutely correlate directly to the endocrine-disrupting garbage that permeates every facet of our life and world, and more importantly, that where any peoples have been even moderately successful in creating a buffer between themselves and "modern" drugs, fossil fuels, and agriculture, they simply live longer and healthier lives. Do you really need to split hairs for a more well-defined truth? Common sense appears to completely abandoned the building.


If you insist on gathering meaningless data, here's some for you:

https://www.pancan.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/incidence_report_2012.pdf

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-pancreatic-cancer-is-on-the-rise/

https://www.cancer.net/cancer-types/pancreatic-cancer/statistics


And to help focus the hopelessness of creating a statistical analysis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zjs3hsIFCHw&t=387s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qnRDefVXvE&t=631s

The "Vitamin A guy" isn't promoting or selling any product, just proposing a hypothesis to explain something that worked dramatically for him after the medical establishment could offer him nothing, in the hope others will test it and see, since n=1 is meaningless. He states right up front that it's nothing more than his own personal theory and could be utter BS, so it's not like he's peddling any gospels. It's doubtful that there is a one size fits all solution to any health problem anyway. To be accurate, it appears that he doesn't have a disease anymore, though his nephrologist told him to get his affairs in order because he should only expect to live about five more years.

It's not hard to sympathize with those, like him, who reject modern medical orthodoxy, given its abject failure to stem (or even understand) the rising epidemic of cancer, autoimmune disease, and inflammation which strongly appear to be environmentally induced. He also did read primary sources, and even duplicated research himself when he was skeptical. The original study, e.g., which determined that Vitamin A was an essential nutrient, claimed that the animals died within 8 weeks from multiple organ failure, their eyes melting in their heads and bones breaking spontaneously from mere casual handling. His doubts were vindicated after his rodents were in perfect health after 30 months. After 4+ years of near complete abstinence from Vitamin A and carotenoids, his serum levels were so near undetectable that the lab called him in consternation, but somehow this 60+ year old retinol-deficient dude has 20/15 vision and perfectly functioning kidneys. So his opinion is at least understandable, given those results.

Tj Jefferson wrote:

I have several in my family that probably have read the Vitamin A paper and thought "this makes total sense". They are already convinced of the truth in the hypothesis....The Vitamin A guy strikes me as the same type, I can poke all kinds of holes in his hypothesis but it would be a personal attack on him, because it means he has a disease not a conspiracy.[/url]

"Dr. Mary's Monkey" regarding the explosion of soft tissue cancers.

For what it's worth, I've chatted with "Vitamin A guy." He seems to be a very straight-up engineer-type person. Definitely not someone I would consider to be a "whacko." He encourages people to not just take his theories at face value and do their own tests to see if the theory lines up for them or not.

Is his theory right? Not sure. But that's kinda how science goes a lot of the time.

Did he pull things out of thin air? I'm quite sure he did not.

It's also important to note that we're doing cancer screenings these days that will detect cancer that most of us would outlive and never even be aware of otherwise.  Our bodies are filled with slow growing cancers at any given time.  Many of them will be destroyed by our own immune systems eventually and many of them would never harm us in a typical life span.  Colonoscopies are an example of a screening that is leading to hundreds of thousands of new cancer discoveries a year, but most of those people would have never died of colon cancer and probably would have lived the rest of their lives not even knowing they were affected.  My MIL has small vaginal cancer polyps removed about once a year at the Mayo, which is an extremely painful and worrisome process for her.  In the old days, I think she would have just assumed they were small lumps that were part of aging.  She is in her 80's and now dealing with Alzheimer's, so those extremely slow growing little lumps could just be left alone in my opinion.  I read once that all men will eventually develop prostate cancer if they live long enough, but it will almost never kill them (or really harm them).  

Cancer diagnosis and treatment is a multi-billion dollar business.

And of course most cancer deaths in the "old days" would have been listed as other causes, and lots of folks were likely to be struck down by something else first even if they did have cancer.

I have no doubt there are much higher cancer rates these days, but the numbers can't be trusted in any era -- including our own.

Alicia Bayer wrote:It's also important to note that we're doing cancer screenings these days that will detect cancer that most of us would outlive and never even be aware of otherwise.  Our bodies are filled with slow growing cancers at any given time.  Many of them will be destroyed by our own immune systems eventually and many of them would never harm us in a typical life span.  Colonoscopies are an example of a screening that is leading to hundreds of thousands of new cancer discoveries a year, but most of those people would have never died of colon cancer and probably would have lived the rest of their lives not even knowing they were affected.  My MIL has small vaginal cancer polyps removed about once a year at the Mayo, which is an extremely painful and worrisome process for her.  In the old days, I think she would have just assumed they were small lumps that were part of aging.  She is in her 80's and now dealing with Alzheimer's, so those extremely slow growing little lumps could just be left alone in my opinion.  I read once that all men will eventually develop prostate cancer if they live long enough, but it will almost never kill them (or really harm them).  

Cancer diagnosis and treatment is a multi-billion dollar business.

And of course most cancer deaths in the "old days" would have been listed as other causes, and lots of folks were likely to be struck down by something else first even if they did have cancer.

I have no doubt there are much higher cancer rates these days, but the numbers can't be trusted in any era -- including our own.

I think a better way to phrase that sentiment might be that, "An isolated, unverified set of numbers can't be taken on faith."

We have to work with the data available. I think it's important to verify those numbers to the best extent possible. I think that, as science progresses, especially past this era of profit-corrupted and manipulated datasets, that the importance of really thoroughly researched and meticulously executed scientific experiments and modelling will continue to get clearer, and the quality of the science will improve.

-CK

That's a good point about cancers being detected and perhaps consequently treated with excessive (and destructive) aggressiveness. One of the reasons I eschew doctors' visits is that I fear they'll find something and proceed to apply their "expert" butchery that will only interfere with my immune system's ongoing process of competently dealing with the problem in its own way and on its own schedule. Sure, chemo and radiation may kill the cancer, but how will the ravaged body subsequently fare? I guess I just trust my body more than I trust an individual who's been brainwashed by a system that has abjectly failed to even discover what causes these maladies and why they've recently proliferated. Trying to avoid the things which have changed in our lifestyles since these conditions arose seems to me a preferable strategy.

The medical establishment is filled with unjustified hubris and arrogance, because the truth is that when it comes to the incredible complexity of the human organism, we're woefully ignorant. Recently I went to a dermatologist (mostly to assuage my wife's paranoia that the eczema might be some kind of cooties she might catch), and she took one look and immediately said "I'm going to fix you," before prescribing some steroid cream and advising me to use some chemical-laden ointment (while disparaging my suggestion to use lanolin instead) to prevent the lesions from drying out. I tried to question her about potential etiology and its possible relation to some concomitant digestive issues, but she was already halfway out the door, typically fixated on only treating symptoms and clearly not the least bit curious about cause. Apparently $400 only buys about five minutes of her precious time. I never used the stupid cream; switching off my immune system to "fix me" is analogous to ripping out a car's check engine light when it comes on and pretending the problem is solved. So far, the "Vitamin A guy" approach is working, but even if it ultimately proves a bust I'm committed to getting to the root instead of just trimming off some branches.