I see the Camp Lejeune ads on TV frequently. I know of no connection my spouse had to that camp. She and her mom did live under the plume of an Asarco plant growing up, which is a huge sad part of Washington history.
There are so many variables but we also have modern tools today to sift through variables. I have another relative with a different kind of cancer, and my father died of metastatic liver cancer with cirrhosis, which we were told is uncommon.
We should look for the clusters. We should harness big data.
I agree with this. Do you think the exposure from the plant played a role in Lisa’s cancerI? I think early female breast cancers not due to genetic mutations are written off as bad luck. One of the male breast cancer cases from Camp Lejeune was 39 when he was diagnosed. Non-smoker. Non-drinker. Harder to write this case off. More to be done for both male and female breast cancers.
My son just finished ‘Emperor of All Maladies’. He is reading Mukhergee’s other books this weekend. This is not assigned reading.
I don’t even have that background in cancer. I dislike anthropomorphizing cancer (although even I sometimes do it) because I think it might keep us further from a cure by locking our thoughts into analogues of human behavior.
So, from my lay perspective is this: the body has the job of making lots of cells every day. It’s like the college student writing a 100 page paper every night. It absorbs from the environment (including food) the chemical compounds it needs to make these cells. It tries assembling them from the pieces and parts it can find, jamming them together sometimes when they don’t fit right. And, the body has other cells that go around attacking poorly made cells.
But, with all these random combinations, it sometimes hits upon a combination that the attacker cells can’t tell are poorly made or that lack the safety feature to die after a time. Or, maybe the body thinks ‘this is great; I’ve figured out how to make cells that won’t die and that will save me a lot of time’
So, the exposure to toxic chemicals increases the odds the body will find one of these random combinations sooner.
My dad smoked two packs a day most of his life, quitting cold turkey about three years before his death. He also was exposed to various volatile organics over about five years (I think) of running a printing business (ie, silk screen). Plus, he worked on cars a lot in his life, exposed to all of their chemicals and I vaguely recall he would clean car parts with gasoline sometimes. I think sometimes he wore a mask, but they probably weren’t as good as the masks today.
My spouse (and her mom) were under the Asarco plume. But, she also was exposed to various volatile organics as part of her beauty regimen.
Although I’m not that kind of lawyer, I do recognize the difficulty of legal proof of “but-for” causation in a tort action. If there are many different possible causes, it’s hard to generate the legal proof that it should be assigned to one cause.
But, if we are to take action politically (and not in tort), we really need to crunch the numbers and find out what makes it more likely than not. It might be that every carbon-based molecule that enters our system increases cancer risk some small percentage and then we can start making political tradeoffs on whether, say, acetone should ever be used unmasked (or even ever in contact with skin).
Maybe some day, we’ll mine Amazon sales data and find out that at least one child of everyone who bought a certain brand of Halloween face paint for 2023 Halloween developed some kind of cancer 50 years later.
The business interests behind every product we use will not want their product to be banned. The task I’m thinking of is one that only government can perform when considered a public health issue. Otherwise, you have any individual actions in tort that are hard, but not always impossible, to prove.
It's good for all of us affected by cancer to think of what we can do with the talents that we have and to push to make things better for the next person and family. That's how I think of my writing - helping another family.
Thank you.
I see the Camp Lejeune ads on TV frequently. I know of no connection my spouse had to that camp. She and her mom did live under the plume of an Asarco plant growing up, which is a huge sad part of Washington history.
There are so many variables but we also have modern tools today to sift through variables. I have another relative with a different kind of cancer, and my father died of metastatic liver cancer with cirrhosis, which we were told is uncommon.
We should look for the clusters. We should harness big data.
I agree with this. Do you think the exposure from the plant played a role in Lisa’s cancerI? I think early female breast cancers not due to genetic mutations are written off as bad luck. One of the male breast cancer cases from Camp Lejeune was 39 when he was diagnosed. Non-smoker. Non-drinker. Harder to write this case off. More to be done for both male and female breast cancers.
My son just finished ‘Emperor of All Maladies’. He is reading Mukhergee’s other books this weekend. This is not assigned reading.
I don’t even have that background in cancer. I dislike anthropomorphizing cancer (although even I sometimes do it) because I think it might keep us further from a cure by locking our thoughts into analogues of human behavior.
So, from my lay perspective is this: the body has the job of making lots of cells every day. It’s like the college student writing a 100 page paper every night. It absorbs from the environment (including food) the chemical compounds it needs to make these cells. It tries assembling them from the pieces and parts it can find, jamming them together sometimes when they don’t fit right. And, the body has other cells that go around attacking poorly made cells.
But, with all these random combinations, it sometimes hits upon a combination that the attacker cells can’t tell are poorly made or that lack the safety feature to die after a time. Or, maybe the body thinks ‘this is great; I’ve figured out how to make cells that won’t die and that will save me a lot of time’
So, the exposure to toxic chemicals increases the odds the body will find one of these random combinations sooner.
My dad smoked two packs a day most of his life, quitting cold turkey about three years before his death. He also was exposed to various volatile organics over about five years (I think) of running a printing business (ie, silk screen). Plus, he worked on cars a lot in his life, exposed to all of their chemicals and I vaguely recall he would clean car parts with gasoline sometimes. I think sometimes he wore a mask, but they probably weren’t as good as the masks today.
My spouse (and her mom) were under the Asarco plume. But, she also was exposed to various volatile organics as part of her beauty regimen.
Although I’m not that kind of lawyer, I do recognize the difficulty of legal proof of “but-for” causation in a tort action. If there are many different possible causes, it’s hard to generate the legal proof that it should be assigned to one cause.
But, if we are to take action politically (and not in tort), we really need to crunch the numbers and find out what makes it more likely than not. It might be that every carbon-based molecule that enters our system increases cancer risk some small percentage and then we can start making political tradeoffs on whether, say, acetone should ever be used unmasked (or even ever in contact with skin).
Maybe some day, we’ll mine Amazon sales data and find out that at least one child of everyone who bought a certain brand of Halloween face paint for 2023 Halloween developed some kind of cancer 50 years later.
The business interests behind every product we use will not want their product to be banned. The task I’m thinking of is one that only government can perform when considered a public health issue. Otherwise, you have any individual actions in tort that are hard, but not always impossible, to prove.
It's good for all of us affected by cancer to think of what we can do with the talents that we have and to push to make things better for the next person and family. That's how I think of my writing - helping another family.