Think twice before lighting that next stick of incense. You might be getting more than a gentle whiff of sandalwood. If a group of researchers in Taiwan is right, burning incense could be a cancer risk. This news might come as a shock to millions of Buddhists, Hindus and Christians who use incense to purify the air, set their minds at ease and treat diseases, and as part of their ceremonies and devotions.
At the Lantau Island Po Lin Monastery in Hong Kong, visitors burn about three sticks each as they pay their respects to the Buddha and their ancestors, feeding their spirits with incense, according to a spokeswoman. Others in Japan stand in front of giant vats and breat he in the scent of hundreds of incense sticks to get wise or just for good measure. “We truly hope that incense burning brings only spiritual comfort, without any physical discomfort,” Ta Chang Lin at the National Cheng Kung University in Tainan told the New Scientist magazine. But “there is a potential cancer risk. We just cannot say how serious it is.”
Smoke from burning incense is laden with cancer-causing chemicals, the researchers say. Levels of one chemical believed to cause lung cancer were 40 times higher in a badly ventilated temple in Taiwan than in houses where people smoke cigarettes. Beyond the cancer scare, incense is actually bad for the air. Incense burning creates more pollution than road traffic at a local intersection. In the smoky temple they tested, the incense emissions exceeded the standard “safe” levels for ambient air set in Taiwan.
Scientists have worked out how a key molecule could be encouraging the re-growth of cancer cells. The molecule AlkB uses a particular chemical process called oxidative demethylation to repair DNA. It relies on the presence of iron and several other chemicals. AlkB could be preventing the success of some conventional cancer treatments, which attack tumours by damaging their DNA.
A chemical isolated from a weed that grows in mountain meadows in the western United States kills the cells of an aggressive brain cancer that affects some children. The compound, cyclopamine, blocks a signaling pathway that appears to be important for the survival of medulloblastoma, a form of cancer for which there is no effective treatment. In an article published in the August 30, 2002, issue of the journal Science, a research team led by Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Philip A. Beachy reported that cyclopamine effectively killed cultured mouse medulloblastoma cells and tumors implanted in animals, as well as medulloblastoma cells extracted from human tumors. “It will be difficult to obtain sufficient quantities of cyclopamine, since it must be extracted and purified from the plant source, Veratrum californicum, the corn lily,” said Beachy, who is at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Teenagers are growing so fast because of better diets and a higher standard of living that their risk of cancer may be increasing, specialists said yesterday. Among young people aged 13 to 24, cancer has increased by more than a quarter in 20 years and by almost half in the past three decades. The disease is now the biggest natural cause of death in the age group and overall, second only to accidents. Some cancers, such as melanoma, have doubled in 20 years and are linked to changing lifestyles, such as the rise in holidays in the sun. But for other common cancers among teenagers, such as leukaemia and testicular cancer, the causes are unclear. Overall, the incidence of teenage cancer rose at 1.2 per cent a year between 1979 and 2000 and now accounts for 2,000 new cases a year.
Children who live next to a petrol station are four times more likely to develop acute leukaemia than other children in the same area, suggests new research. The small study, carried out at four sites in France, looked at 280 children with leukaemia and a control group of 285 children, all younger than 15 years. The children’s mothers were given a questionnaire relating to their lifestyle. The researchers found that children living next door to a petrol station or automotive garage had a quadrupled risk of leukaemia. And the risk of developing acute non-lymphoblastic leukaemia was seven times greater compared with children who lived in the same area, but not next to a petrol station.
Sir Richard Doll, who has been involved in the study since the start, said smoking was still a major killer in the UK. “Over the past few decades prevention and better treatment of disease have halved non-smoker death rates in the elderly in Britain. “But these improvements have been completely nullified by the rapidly increasing hazards of tobacco for those who continue to smoke cigarettes.” Sir Richard Peto, professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at Oxford University has collaborated on the study for 30 years. He said smoking was responsible for millions of death. “Partly because of earlier results from this 50-year-long study many people in Britain gave up smoking, and this country now has the best decrease in tobacco deaths in the world.
In addition to the unjustified guilt referred to above, cancer patients and their loved ones can be psychologically harmed in several other ways. Misplaced trust. In nearly every case of harm I have examined, misplaced trust either preceded the use of a directly harmful procedure or prevented the patient from obtaining effective care. The deadly message promoted by cancer quackery is that “orthodoxy cannot be trusted.” Undermining trust in the research and therapeutic establishment, the government regulators, and the American Cancer Society is crucial to the promotion of so-called “alternative” approaches to cancer management. A case I investigated from Oregon provides insight into the thinking and actions of “true believers.”