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To: Gord Bolton who wrote (82196)	2/17/2002 3:36:39 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 116976

The hordes of people not dying young do not automatically get Cancer because they are now allowed to get old. -- Unless that group by massive co-incidence is more likely to get Cancer than their survivors. The incidence of Cancer is a measured by a percentage cause of death. This percentage relation to the remaining causes of death should not change in relation to the remaining diseases, just because there are more people dying later. Why would heart disease not kill them first? Why was heart disease ahead of Cancer as a killer at one point in this century? What changed? Do you think that statisticians are that simplistic that they talk of an increase in Cancer related deaths as merely an increase in raw numbers of deaths? Cancer is killing more people at all ages. This is called an age adjusted statistic. Women are being killed of breast cancer between 40 and 60. This is not purely a disease of old age, but we could say it is a disease that take a long time to develop, admittedly a fine distinction. You are trying to oversimplify, a common mistake. Don't hide your head in the sand. These statistics are frightfully hard to interpret. They carry with them absent control groups, hordes of variables that are impossible to control for, and long time periods where statistics were poorly kept. Don't think you can relax on easy to make assumptions- having a hope of being right. The penny will take a long time to drop. It has fooled good men for a long time. I approach if from a global or gestalt heuristic perspective. I work from instinct and destroy the straw men of assumption one by one. I will not rest until all the reasoning pathways are comfortable and inescapably correct. I will admit that at first the more people living longer makes for more cancer cases is a seductive concept. At first. But there are some significant weaknesses. The cause of various cancers is one of the most difficult multi-variable statistical problems that has ever confronted mankind. Gord, my boy, if your time theory is the solution, you can take home a Nobel. Finally after long years doctors have pointed to the smoking gun at various cancers, all puns intended. Cancers appear, as we "smoke" them out, to be agent and environment specific. Agents are found to be carcinogens. Things cause cancer. Our immune system fights cancer. Some things weaken the immune system, some strengthen it. And so it goes. They will isolate the cause of breast and prostate cancer in the environment. And the strengths and weaknesses that allow some to slip it and others succumb. But when 50% of the human race succumbs, you know damn well there is some agent out there. Otherwise the incidence of Cancers would be Cancer-type-random and advanced-age-specific. EC<:-}