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Political leaders have the responsibility to build cancer-prevention mechanisms
New study claims that lifestyle and environment play major role in cancer, being responsible for increasing cancer rates.
Actually, according to the study published in the journal Nature at the beginning of this week, lifestyle and environment are accountable for the majority of cancers.
Authors of the study claim that in some types of cancers it is easier to identify the environmental and lifestyle factors which lead to the disease. For example, lung cancer is well known to be caused by air pollution and smoking. For skin cancer it is the increasing amount of radiation coming from the sun and also lifestyle choices such as sunbathing or using tanning beds.
A previous paper was arguing that cancers are mostly a result of ‘bad luck’ given by some gene modifications in the replication of DNA. But the World Health Organization issued a press release, saying that it strongly disagrees with those conclusions, which might be misleading, letting people believe that cancer cannot be prevented.
The World Health Organization declared at that time that about half of the cancers could be prevented by changes in people’s lifestyle and by reducing the exposure to environmental cancer-causing agents.
However, the authors of the recent study claim that intrinsic factors contribute to only 10 to 30 percent of lifetime risk to the development of cancer. They conclude that the majority of the risk factors which lead to development of cancer are given by extrinsic factors which could be prevented.
The external factors which cause the most of the cancers are the polluted air that we breathe, the unhealthy food that we eat and the amount of chemicals we are exposed to.
Even if all of these factors seem to be in our control, actually no individual can have absolute control over all of these factors, especially when they come from environmental elements.
While it would be easier for each person to control what they are eating or if they choose to smoke or use a tanning bed, it is not under their control the quality of the air their breath or the amount of toxic UVs coming from the sun through the thinning ozone.
All these factors are the responsibility of the ruling classes and of the governments that should protect their citizens not only through health programs which might or might not cure their cancers after they have occurred, but also build preventive mechanism by regulating the environmental factors which might lead to the disease.
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