This.
I live in Belgium coming from Italy and it's scary how many people I know gets cancer here. Like someone i know every few months gets it (and I'm not talking about just old people. A couple guys i know got it in their 20s). And it's all people relatively healthy.
Compare that to Italy where nobody I know does any effort to be healthy, eats lots of red meat (we do like our pork meat but it's all local stuff), smoke, veggies just a small side dish, no sport at all and they still live longer, healthier lives.
The few people i know who got cancer there, were well over their 60s (and all of them eventually survived).
I'm talking about the region Umbria which is pretty pristine and barely industrialized.
This made me realize that the best thing you can do for your health is just picking the right place to live.
What do you think it is about Belgium (a small country but by no means homogenous) that makes it more carcinogous than Italy? In the 40 years that I've lived here I've only know one or two cases of young people getting cancer.
Some stats do seem to confirm your anecdote: Belgium gets 345.8 cases / 100K (6th highest in the world) and Italy 290.6 / 100K (24th highest).
Maybe it's the zone? I'm in WV and it feels extremely bad here. One note: my experience is in Umbria, I know that there are some other parts in Italy which are pretty polluted.
By the way I've been wondering the same thing for years now. I don't know why. My hypothesis is pollution since the biggest difference between the 2 zones is the levels of industrialization.
It might have to do with better screening. I've read in the past that Belgium is a frontrunner in the screening for certain cancers (like breast and colon afaik).
If you screen more, you will find more.
Italy is quite poor and probably doesn't have the resources to invest, so ends up with lower stats.
The air. Extreme traffic, old people burning wood (or worse) to heat their houses and a lot of polluting industry. Depending on the type of weather most days the air is unbreathable. I'm not saying that WV is worse than the rest of Belgium. This is just the place I'm experiencing.
> This made me realize that the best thing you can do for your health is just picking the right place to live.
Imagine you’re completely wrong about this — because it’s a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in. What’s another answer for why Belgians seem to get cancer more often than Italians?
> a very dangerous assumption to be completely confident in
Why would it be "dangerous"? It should be almost completely common sense. Sure, the conclusion is not a comfortable realization for rich industrial countries that have completely poisoned themselves and really don't want to pay the bill for any sort of large scale investigation (factory by factory, soil patch by soil patch, each commonly used construction material etc.) and massive decontamination measures that would have to come after...
Anyway, people will make tradeoffs, and they'll likely choose to live in places with better paid jobs... but they're damn well entitled to ask for an extra 25% on that already large enticing salary if it comes with +X% probability of terrible illness and lower life expectancy!
It is a dangerous assumption if wrong because it prescribes that you can do most unhealthy activities and they are not major factors for your health outcomes.
Well this doesn't mean that you can smoke all day if you move to Umbria and be safe. But what I noticed is that in some places smoking is much riskier than others.
Does anyone here think Australia is more polluted than say India?
And also all the top countries in that list are all part of the more developed world, where pollution levels in general are much less than say other parts of the world.
While pollution might still be an issue it could also be that people living in developed countries have more access to healthcare and so their detection rates are higher.
I think that Australia and NZ might be very high because of skin cancers and the infamous ozone hole.
India can probably be extremely polluted in the cities but I wonder if it's the same in the country side.
And fair enough, african countries might have undetected cancers and have people die of other disease before getting old enough for cancers. But I was comparing Umbria to Belgian Flanders which are both 1st world countries.
It's an extremely common deficiency that has links to a ton of issues, and it's quite easy to correct, so it's an extremely low hanging fruit in terms of reducing your risk for a ton of things.
Not really. It used to be a mix of seed oils and animal fat. But I don't think that many fries places do still use the animal fat part for "health reasons".
I always wondered if our passion for travel has deeper roots.
Maybe it comes from our ancestral need to move to greener pastures in search for food and better climate.
Sometimes we prefer go for long hikes, some others to stop and chill in enjoyable temperatures, close to water from sea, rivers or lakes.
All of this makes me think that deep inside we are at least partially still nomad creatures.
I hate FB as anyone else here, but I'd be worried of whatever will take its place.
All this anti Meta sentiment is only helping even worse competitors like Tiktok to grow.
And to be fair I have the feeling that this anti FB campaign that has been going on for years is probably well funded and orchestrated by some competing interest.
As I understand the theory here is that humans develop antibodies against the parts that mutate making our immune system ineffective, while a vaccine could teach the immune system a better part to identify against.
How many people are effectively managing the disease now who would have died 30 years ago? Perhaps you should be less glib out of respect for their lives.
You're responding to somebody mentioning that a cure has been announced as being immanent a dozen times, not somebody who is denouncing medicine in general. No need to attack unless you actually disagree.
It's not an attack to remember that medicine is about saving lives: changing HIV from a death sentence to a daily pill was _huge_ improvement for people and it feels quite weird to act as if nothing changed.
> How many people are effectively managing the disease now who would have died 30 years ago? Perhaps you should be less glib out of respect for their lives.
I don't think the parent commenter was being glib. Treatments are great, but a treatment is not the same thing as a cure. Lots folks successfully treat their diabetes, but I'll bet most of them would prefer a cure for diabetes.
No question, but that doesn’t make science hype just because it didn’t produce a cure by the end of the episode. Just in case it wasn’t clear, I’m explicitly calling out that choice of wording. If they’d said “this is a notoriously hard problem”, I’d agree.
They're different but not completely so: what I'd look at is the cost to someone's life. For example, glasses don't “cure” bad eyesight but they lower the impact down to the point where most people don't care. Type 1 diabetes used to be a death sentence, it's still uncurable and while it's not fun to have I know plenty of people would have died before graduating high school a century ago who are living normal lives, raising children, etc.
Similarly, when I was growing up HIV was a death sentence and it was tearing through many social groups. The gay friends I have, especially the slightly older ones, have talked about the trauma that caused because their social networks were decimated _and_ a lot of people blamed the suffering on them. Now, it's not ideal to be on medication but it means that people are reaching close to average longevity with far more manageable health impacts — again, not perfect but decades of extra time with friends and family is a transformative change.
What about dismissing decades of hard work by many thousands of people as “hype”? There've been a lot of disappointments along the way but it's not like these were the people pushing Ivermectin as a COVID treatment — a ton of scientific careers have been spent working on this and it seems far too glib to brush that away as if there isn't a life-changingly better prognosis for someone who learned they were infected today compared to 30 years ago.
Don't believe the hype is a common expression in English. You are just reading much too much into it IMHO. And I don't like to see discussions derail into this.
If you're familiar with the expression, you're also familiar with it having a connotation of something being oversold, usually for reasons of sales or politics. I don't think that's a fair way to describe good faith scientific research into a hard problem.
You've had three, (now four) people explicitly mention that your comment was needlessly hostile. To each of those people, you've responded defensively.
I would suggest that you carefully review what was written, what you wrote, what the feedback from it was, and consider if there is room for improvement rather than just digging in.
Since your reply was cordial, I'll note that I probably would have used wording to make it more clear that I was specifically unimpressed by the use of terms like hype or what read as the implication that there's been a widespread representation that a cure is close. I've typically only seen that in the context of the various scam claims over the years, not mainstream research — the coverage I've read since at least the 90s always mentioned it as a very hard target a long time off.
Maybe I'm a bit biased from having worked at some places where researchers were working on problems like this but it felt unfair to focus on that but not mention that there are now mainstream treatments developed as part of that work which have made a huge improvement for millions of people globally.
While PEP/PrEP is not a cure for HIV infection it both prevents AIDS and suppresses HIV so far that patients are no longer infectious. This solution is real, proven and available and is applied in practice right now. The only practical difference between this and a vaccine is that the user has to keep taking medication.
Could someone with more knowledge explain to me why a vaccine against HIV would not also be a cure?
If the body has antibodies against HIV so you can't get infected, it should also be possible to kill HIV as well when you are infected? Especially since the vaccine targets a structure which the normal immune protection normally doesn't target?
Protection from infection is sort of like cleaning up a spill on your doorstep. Curing an active infection is more like cleaning up after someone deliberately blew dirt throughout your whole house, and hid some extra in nooks and crannies.
A vaccine has the potential to give you enough of an immune response to prevent an infection. But eradicating an existing HIV infection is a very different problem. The virus lies dormant in large quantities, and your immune system will only attack the virus that’s “awake”. The current research for a cure is focusing on eliminating this viral reservoir. While your immune system could theoretically keep the active HIV at bay, leading to a functional cure; we’ve never seen this play out (other than in Timothy Ray Brown). HIV always wakes up, and replicates faster than your lymphocytes can kill it (while using your immune system as a virus factory).
The only source of their stats is the party. It's part of their politics to downplay the bad and show off the good. They have nothing to gain by showing to their population that they are weak in front of this pandemic.
There are only 22 countries that do not have diplomatic missions to China.
The remaining countries have embassies, counsel general offices, and similar throughout China. Beijing has 172 embassies plus missions from the EU, African Union, Arab League, and the UN.
24 other cities throughout China have counsel general offices [1].
All of these have extensive contact with the local populations, and all of them have secure means of communication back to the home governments.
There are a large number of foreigners from a wide variety of countries living in China for business reasons, or visiting China for business reasons, who have extensive contact with the local populations.
The party might be able to control the domestic flow of information sufficiently to keep their own people in the dark, but for events with wide impact such as epidemics and pandemics they can't stop other governments from finding out through reports from all those foreigners.
Conclusion: either China's death rates are actually quite low from COVID, or they are not and the other governments (including the US, all of the EU, Japan, Australia, Korea) know this but are keeping it secret themselves as are the numerous non-government workers who regular are in China.
The only source of statistics is the party, but that's not the only source of information. If the healthcare system was collapsing in China due to COVID megadeaths, we'd know.
Whether the healthcare system "collapses" has to do with how hard it actually tries. We did get reports early on that the crematoriums were working far more than usual.
> We did get reports early on that the crematoriums were working far more than usual.
That's precisely what I'm talking about, right? That information got out; the world was able to see information indicating a higher death toll that official numbers implied, despite attempts to keep it quiet.
Downplay or pretend that side-effects do not exist will only exacerbate the already high distrust on medical institutions.
Acknowledgement, sincerity and the will to improve is the only way to fix the huge distrust that has been built in the last couple years (or maybe decades).
Man, you need to realize this is your own personal view. Most people doesn't find it weird or unethical.
And what makes you think that only "mentally healthy individuals" share this world view with you?
Your harsh answers make it sound like you are the one with emotional issues.
Yes, in my own personal view, inappropriate behavior, i.e. any behavior that is not covered by an employment contract, while on the clock is unethical. I don't take issue with your choice to engage in unethical behavior, so long as it doesn't affect me or victimizes anyone. Even if you're not victimizing coworkers, which is unclear, you're still victimizing your employer.
Put limitations to what a private entity can do on national soil is completely in the hands of local governments. If you want to make money here, you follow our rules. Completely free capitalism brings the kind of aberrations that we can already see destroying the livelihood of millions of people in the USA
That is abuse of the monopolistic control the state exerts over the land within its jurisdiction. It would be equally abusive if the state used it to prohibit homosexual intercourse, marijuana usage or atheism-promoting speech.
>>Completely free capitalism brings the kind of aberrations that we can already see destroying the livelihood of millions of people in the USA
The idea that the US has "completely free capitalism" is the Big Lie promoted by the state's unionized activist bureaucracy. The US, along with the rest of advanced nations, has rapidly moved away from being a free society with economic liberty, toward one that has a significant amount of centralized control over the private actions of its citizens:
