What Kills Us This Week!

Haven't been writing about Hong Kong's vastly entertaining panic-epidemics for a while now, mainly because there haven't been any. I don't know what's up with HK but everyone's been very sane for many many months and it's all most uncharacteristic and most disappointing.

However, there is one thing on the health front that people are only just beginning to talk about that I have high hopes for:

Guangdong Cancer!  

Do you know about this?  A particular type of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (a nose and throat cancer) that is found mainly - almost exclusively in fact - in Southern China around the Guangdong Region? And that includes HK!

And, yes, there was a panic-epidemic a few years back about this disease wherein everyone was blaming salted fish and so stopped eating it, which was very sad because salting fish is often the single last operation keeping some of HK's outlying islands in business, so this panic-fest had unpleasant ramifications.

I have my own ideas about cancer but the widespread nature of Guangdong Cancer gave me pause for thought:  "It has to be situational."  and "It's something in the environment." and "It has to be caused by air pollution." and "It not the salted fish, it's all those factories up in the Pearl River Delta churning out toxins." I kept thinking which rather unnerved me because all these thoughts challenge my own ideas about what causes cells to turn cancerous.

I have long believed that cancer is caused by a combination of factors: a fragile gene, a virus, a compromised immune system, a diet low in green leafy vegetables, and - most importantly - a huge emotional blow shocking your body at a time when your spirits are low and your diet is bad and consequently your immune system is down, which starts a process I don't yet understand - but I think no one does - wherein all these viruses sink into your cells and, if it's the appropriate virus and in a part of your body governed by a particular inherited fragile gene, it begins to multiply and ... BINGO!!!

Sidebar for an interesting story here:  When Talei was having her operation a few years ago, the hospital had a strict "no tolerance" smoking policy so I spent a lot of time out on the street with the others smokers, most of whom were in hospital gowns and pushing their IV units, and, yes, a lot of them were cancer victims. They were all about my age, and initially, watching them all sucking down the nicotine, I thought "This is like a wake-up call"  but then a lovely lady cancer patient began a conversation about diet and it turned out "Never touched a vegetable in my life." every single one of these cancer sufferers said, with a great deal of scoffing and scorn and very proud of themselves.

Most mmmm!, la?  But then I began private chats with each of them in turn wherein I asked "What happened to you six months ago that made you despair?" and each of them had a tale to tell, almost exclusively about betrayal by a loved one, most frequently their now-adult children.  More mmmmm!, yes?

But despite this unexpected confirmation of my beliefs, Guangdong Cancer had me pausing for thought and wondering if I was wrong about everything.

Except ... yesterday, in South China Morning Post, there's the release of the report into the studies made by Singapore University (Singapore too has an exceptionally high level of N&T cancer) and Sun-Yat Sen University in Guangzhou, into Guangdong Cancer ...

... Oh damn!  It's not here! Oh man! I left the paper behind. I meant to keep the article.  I meant to and now I realise I didn't bring it home with me. Damn! 

Anyway, from memory ... Guangdong Cancer turns out to be a disease suffered by people who all descended from the same source, a man alive six thousand years ago who passed down three mutated genes - one the same fragile gene which is more usually linked to a particular type of leukemia, coupled with two other fragile genes one of which has something to do with how your immune system mis-fires.  And they also named the virus that causes it which I could have told you only - damn! - I don't have the article.

Oh look, found a different article that tells of the same report:

"Two chromosomes, at 11q13 and 12p13.3, were further characterized as the most common regions of gain, with up to 50-70% of primary NPC cells. Detailed analysis subsequently demonstrated that within the 5.3kb amplicon at 11q13, the CCND1 gene, and its encoding protein Cyclin D1, which is a key component for cell cycle regulation, was a target oncogene for NPC ... At the same time work is also proceeding on the 12p13.3 amplification region where two possible NPC oncogenes, LTBR and FLJ10665, have been identified for further study."

Mmmm, my explanation was much easier to understand, wasn't it!

So anyway, this report confirms two points in my theory: inherited fragile genes coming into contact with a particular virus.

As for the rest of it?  Wouldn't you just love to talk to the folks in their study to ask them all about the nasty thing their now-adult children did to them six months ago?

So that would have to be my choice for this week:

THREATDOWN

Having adult children!