Saturday, March 5, 2011

How Not to Die of Cancer

I’m re-reading Siddhartha Mukherjee’s wonderful book, “The Emperor of All Maladies—a biography of cancer.”

He says so many things that are obvious after you read them but that we don’t think about day to day. Such as: “Cancer is imprinted in our society: as we extend our life span as a species, we inevitably unleash malignant growth (mutations in cancer genes accumulate with aging) so that cancer is thus intrinsically related to age. If we seek immortality, then so, too, in a rather perverse sense, does the cancer cell.”

This is one of the reasons people in the developing world have more cancer. We live long enough to get cancer.

So how to not die of cancer:

Die young.

Die of malnutrition.

Or die of TB, cholera, malaria, dysentery, or any of the prevalent fevers in the second and third worlds: Choose from River Fever, Dengai Fever or Scarlett Fever.

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