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More Than A Third Of All Global Cancer Cases Are Preventable Through Lifestyle Changes, WHO Says 

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According to a new study and analysis from the World Health Organization (WHO), more than a third of all cancer cases globally are preventable. There are several ways in which we can reduce the odds of many different kinds of cancers developing, and a lot of it has to do with our overall lifestyle habits. 

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The organization wrote that lung, stomach, and cervical cancers make up nearly half of those cases, meaning that millions of deadly cancers every year could be prevented through medical intervention, behavior changes, reducing occupational risks, and/or combatting environmental pollutants, according to ScienceAlert. 

The study itself was published in Nature Medicine.

“Addressing these preventable causes represents one of the most powerful opportunities to reduce the global cancer burden,” says Isabelle Soerjomataram, medical epidemiologist at WHO and senior author of the analysis.

The specific analysis found that in 2022 there were about 19 million new cases of cancer, and about 38% of those diagnoses were related to 30 changeable risk factors. 

It was reported that these risk factors include “tobacco smoking, alcohol consumption, high body mass index, insufficient physical activity, smokeless tobacco (like chewing tobacco), a traditional stimulant known as areca nut, suboptimal breastfeeding, air pollution, ultraviolet radiation, infectious agents, and over a dozen occupational exposures.”

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Smoking tobacco was the number one preventable factor associated with cancer, and was linked to 15% of all cancer cases in 2022. 

For men specifically this risk was particularly high, and smoking contributed to 23% of all new cancer cases globally in men that year. 

Air pollution also plays a major role in cancer cases, and varies by region. In East Asia, it was reported that around 15% of all lung cancer cases in women were due to air pollution. In Northern Africa and Western Asia, about 20% of all lung cancer cases in men were also due to air pollution. 

Drinking alcohol was the second changeable lifestyle factor that was linked to 3.2% (around 700,000) of all new cancer cases. 

Certain infections within the body were also linked to about 10% of new cancer cases. In women, the largest share of preventable cancers were due to high-risk human papillomavirus, or HPV, which has been known to potentially lead to cervical cancer. 

“By examining patterns across countries and population groups, we can provide governments and individuals with more specific information to help prevent many cancer cases before they start,” says André Ilbawi, WHO Team Lead for Cancer Control and co-author of the analysis.

Outgoing National Institutes Of Health Director Tells Americans To Focus On Covid As The Real Enemy 

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“I get upset because people point to anecdotes of somebody who got sick even though they had been vaccinated and say, ‘There, you see, it doesn’t work,’ That’s way too simplistic,” said Dr. Francis Collins on his last day as director of the National Institutes of Health. 

Around 50 million Americans still haven’t received even their first dose of Covid-19 inoculation, and with the omicron variant causing a major surge in new cases throughout the US, Collins made his frustration in those still refusing to get vaccinated evident. 

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“How did that happen? How did we get all of this so mixed up with social media, misinformation, and political insertion into the discussion? This is the thing for me on my last day as NIH director that I find particularly frustrating.”

An investigation performed by NPR revealed that vaccination rates are substantially lower in US counties that were in support of former president Donald Trump. Individuals living in counties that had a 60% or higher approval rating for Trump are three times more likely to die from Covid-19 due to the lack of inoculations. 

“We’ve got to remember, Covid is the enemy. It’s not the other people in the other political party. It’s not the people on Facebook who are posting all sorts of crazy conspiracies. This is the enemy,” Collins exclaimed. 

“We in this country have somehow gotten all fractured into a hyper-polarized, politicized view that never should have been mixed with public health. It’s been ruinous and history will judge harshly those people who have continued to defocus the effort and focus on conspiracies and things that are demonstrably false.”

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Collins also warned that with its dozens of mutations, “the omicron variant has the properties to potentially be evasive of the vaccines. I urge the 60% of Americans who are eligible for a booster shot but haven’t gotten one to take action.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke to the media this week as well, explaining that the omicron variant is particularly concerning because of its “extraordinary transmissibility. It has a ‘doubling time’ of just 2-3 days. That’s the time it takes for the number of coronavirus cases to double.” 

Data from South Africa, where the omicron variant first emerged, shows that it leads to less severe symptoms and does require less hospitalization, but that could also be due to the fact that “South Africa’s population has so much experience with prior infections that it might be underlying immunity that’s making it look like it’s less severe.”

“And even if omicron does turn out to be less severe than delta, the sheer number of expected omicron infections is likely to overcome the “slight-to-moderate diminution in severity. U.S. hospitals are going to be very stressed with people,” Fauci said.

World Health Organization

Independent WHO Panel Report Claims Covid-19 Pandemic Was Preventable 

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An independent panel with the World Health Organization (WHO) claimed that the Covid-19 pandemic was completely avoidable if world leaders acted appropriately when it first began. 

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former president of Liberia, were both members of the panel which was called the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response. 

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World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus assembled the independent panel last May to examine the pandemic in its entirety to understand where the world went wrong. This way in the future the world will hopefully be much better prepared should something like this happen again. 

“February 2020 was a month of lost opportunity to avert a pandemic, as so many countries chose to wait and see.”

“For some, it wasn’t until hospital ICU beds began to fill that more action was taken, and by then it was too late to avert the pandemic impact. What followed then was a winner takes all scramble for PPE and therapeutics. Globally, health workers were tested to their limits and the rates of infection, illness and death soared and continue to soar,” Clark explained. 

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“The situation we find ourselves in today could have been prevented. An outbreak of a new pathogen, Sars CoV-2 became a catastrophic pandemic that has now killed more than 3.25 million people, and continues to threaten lives and livelihoods all over the world,” Sirleaf said.

“It is due to a myriad of failures, gaps and delays in preparedness and response. This was partly due to failure to learn from the past.”

The panel went on to urge world leaders, particularly those in wealthier countries, to donate at least 1 billion vaccine doses to low and middle income countries that are still struggling to receive initial doses. This is also a part of WHO’s Covax Gavi Advance Market Commitment, which is described as a vaccine equity plan that will ensure more than 2 billion doses are distributed by 2022. 

Overall, our world leaders needed to do a better job at uniting together and letting science lead us through any future pandemics. As we saw earlier on with this one, before a vaccine was even a possibility, countries like New Zealand were able to completely reopen without any restrictions because they were able to become completely Covid-free with the policies they followed.