Is cancer man-made?
3 Nov 2010 by Evoluted New Media
Cancer is a man-made disease caused by environmental factors like pollution and diet according to researchers who have been studying the remains of Egyptian mummies looking for clues to the disease.
Cancer is a man-made disease caused by environmental factors like pollution and diet according to researchers who have been studying the remains of Egyptian mummies looking for clues to the disease.
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Egyptian mummies, on the whole, show no signs of cancer |
Professor Rosalie David from the University of Manchester thinks that cancer is a modern disease due to its extreme rarity in ancient times. The study of remains and literature from ancient Egypt and Greece – and earlier periods – revealed only one case of cancer in thousands of mummies.
Professor Michael Zimmerman, visiting professor at the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology in Manchester, made the first ever histological diagnosis of cancer in an unnamed mummy – an ordinary person who suffered from rectal cancer – during the Ptolemaic period.
“In an ancient society lacking surgical intervention, evidence of cancer should remain in all cases,” said Zimmerman, whose experimental studies indicate that mummification preserves the feature of malignancy with tumours being better preserved than normal tissue.
“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 industrialisation,” he said.
Evidence of cancer in animal fossils, non-human primates and early humans is scare, so the researchers concluded that – because there is nothing in the natural environment to cause cancer – the disease must be man-made and caused by pollution, diet and lifestyle. It has been suggested that the short life span of individuals precluded the development of cancer – and although there may be some truth in this – some people in antiquity did live long enough to develop other diseases like atherosclerosis and osteoporosis.
“The important thing about our study is that it gives a historical perspective to this disease. We can make very clear statements on the cancer rates in societies because we have a full overview. We have looked at millennia, not one hundred years, and have masses of data,” David said, “Yet again extensive ancient Egyptian data, along with other data from across the millennia, has given modern society a clear message – cancer is man-made and something we can and should address.”
