Enlighten public on cancer causes

Cancer has risen in Kenya, as it has worldwide. No one wants to get cancer, so understanding what’s causing it is something most people want to do. Yet the public are often very far removed from understanding the causes of cancer, and even manipulated about what is and what is not causing our soaring volume of cancer deaths.

Thus, even when we get powerful scientific studies, and even when it is known sometimes throughout the medical profession what causes and accelerates the progression of cancer, we the public are often the last to know when we are flirting with death.

This seems to have been a recurring theme, with the first huge tussle over information on cancer risks playing out over smoking. A glamourous activity and industry back in the 1950s, the tobacco companies waged a long war against claims their product was cancerous, before finally ceding to the medical evidence.

But the industry resistance in more recent decades has been more subtle. Take parabens. Parabens are a common preservative in personal care and beauty products.

They stop bacteria forming in deodorants, face creams and all those nice-smelling things, thereby increasing the shelf life of the products.

They also accelerate the growth of breast cancer cells, meaning that a first action for anyone diagnosed with breast cancer is to stop using any deodorants with parabens in them.

Now that much is proven, and saw the European Union long ago completely ban five types of parabens. Yet the information on the Internet presents the role of parabens in cancer as a controversy.

That is not because anyone denies the proof that they accelerate the progression of breast cancer, the argument is more subtle: do they increase the risk of getting breast cancer in the first place? Put another way, do they cause cancer or only accelerate it once it has begun another way?

It’s a fine point for we the public, for once we know that parabens definitively accelerate breast cancer, there aren’t many women who say, ‘please, please, can I have face cream and deodorant with parabens in them?’

Moreover, here’s the thing about our cancer trends in Kenya – look at the data and you will find that the surge in breast cancer is amongst urban young women. Indeed, breast cancer is now the biggest killer of urban young women in the country.

So, we may point to all sorts of chemicals or reasons for cancer, but cancer is substantially urban, rather than rural, which ties tightly with the evidence on the role of parabens in cosmetics.

Urban living, however, also involves our second big, proven cancer driver: air pollution. Years of studies on the heavy metals and other particles in air that cause cancer have driven the World Health Organisation to set safe levels for particulates and certain pollutants. Nairobi breaks all of them. The air we breathe in our capital is cancerous.

That is much harder to mitigate against than reading product labels and avoiding cosmetics that contain parabens.

But there is another cancer agent that we can control, and that’s sugar.

Once a patient presents with cancer, almost every doctor will stop them consuming sugary foods, because sugar is pure fuel to the growth of more cancerous cells – and be clear what cancer is, it’s a cell deformation that sees cells replicating into great lumps and bundles of cells, that we call tumours, effectively preventing the functioning of organs and eventually all elements of our bodies.

So speeding cancerous cell growth makes cancer worse.

There are even other so-called good things that can raise risk. Because sugar is so devastating to human health, across obesity, cancer, diabetes and almost every kind of lifestyle disease, our soda makers offer sugar-free drinks.

One of the common sweeteners, aspartame has been shown to cause cancer in animals. But, says the industry, it was given in huge doses: we shouldn’t worry about this risk. And maybe not.

But overall, the more we avoid proven cancer causes and accelerators by regulating to improve our air quality and by choosing what we put on our skin and what we eat, the more risk we eliminate. It’s just that simple.