Bested by deadly cancer scourge
Despite various campaigns over the last few decades, and the large sums of money spent on research, cancer remains a scourge. «In the battle with cancer, we have come off worst,» said Professor Dimitris Trichopoulos, of Athens and Harvard universities (cancer prevention and epidemiology) in an interview with Kathimerini. He pointed out that, despite important progress in leukemia and lymphomas, the battle against cancer has simply not seen the same kind of progress as coronary disease. «Gene therapies have been unsuccessful everywhere. Striking a blow at cancer once and for all through fixing gene damage at a molecular level is not even a distant prospect; it’s a dream,» he said. But he pointed out that prevention, rather than treatment, has always been the way to deal with diseases effectively. The discovery of carcinogenic factors is good news for Trichopoulos, who discovered that passive smoking is linked to lung cancer, as well as being a means to prevent breast, liver and other cancers. «Sixty percent of what we can do about cancer is prevention,» he said. But a third of cases cannot be prevented, «perhaps because they are the expression of life itself, the mechanisms of life, which we can’t do anything about.»
