Dozens of countries suffering mystery spikes of all different kinds of tumors in young people

 Doctors across the world are sounding the alarm over a surging epidemic of young people being diagnosed with cancers more commonly associated with the elderly. 

Between 1990 and 2019, cases of cancer in young people across the globe have increased by 79 percent and deaths have risen 28 percent. 

Studies project diagnoses will continue to rise by 31 percent and deaths will rise by 21 percent in 2030. 

Nearly every continent is experiencing an increase of various types of cancer in people under 50 years old, which is particularly problematic as the disease tends to be caught in later stages in this population because most doctors aren't trained to look for it in young people.

The disparities of rates and types of the disease are puzzling scientists and have prompted some to kick off multi-decade research projects that will involve hundreds of thousands of people from around the world. 

Globally, Australia has seen the highest number of early-onset cancer diagnoses in the world, with a rate of 135 per 100,000 people. 

Nearby New Zealand has the second highest rate, at 119 cases in people under 50 per 100,000 people. 

But while breast cancer is the top disease in Australia, colon cancer ranks first in its neighbor. 

The above shows the most common type of cancer in each country

The above graph shows the change in cancer case rates around the world

In Asia, Japan and South Korea may be close in proximity and similar economically, but they have different rates of early-onset colon cancer, which is increasing at a faster rate in South Korea.

The United States falls in sixth place, with 87 cases per 100,000 people under 50 years old and the UK takes the 28th spot, with 70.5 cases per 100,000 people. 

Cancers increasing the fastest include throat and prostate cancers. Early-onset cancers with the highest mortality include beast, tracheal (windpipe), lung, stomach and colon. 

Experts have longed speculated the increasing obesity rates and earlier cancer screenings may be behind the rise, as well as high-fat diets, alcohol consumption and tobacco use.

Actor Olivia Munn, 43, revealed recently she had been diagnosed with breast cancer and has undergone four surgeries in the last 10 months

However, because lifestyles, habits and diets vary so widely from country-to-country, they now believe these factors do not entirely account for the surge.

Daniel Huang, a hepatologist at the National University of Singapore, told Nature: 'Many have hypothesized that things like obesity and alcohol consumption might explain some of our findings. But it looks like you need a deeper dive into the data.'

More recent researchers have begun to focus on a genetic component to early-onset cancer. Some have found younger people develop more aggressive tumors than older patients, which are better at suppressing a person's immune system. 

Pathologist Shuji Ogino at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues have also discovered a weakened immune response in people with early-onset tumors. 

Still, however, the differences are subtle, Ogino said, and a clear reason cannot be determined. 

A new field of research is the impact on early-onset cancer by the body's microbiome, the collection of all microbes, such as bacteria, fungi, viruses, and their genes, that naturally live in the human body. 

The microbiome can be 'disrupted' by dietary changes and an increase in antibiotic use. The upsetting of the microbiome can lead to inflammation, which has been linked to an increase in several diseases, including cancer. 

However, more extensive research on the matter needs to be conducted. 

Of particular concern is colon cancer among young people. Data has shown the rate of cases among people ages 20 to 34 have risen 40 percent between 2010 and 2020.

And it is predicted they will rise 90 percent by 2030. 

Cancers of the colon and rectum are the third most common type in the US and the third leading cause of death in both men and women.

The above shows the most common cancers and their mortality rates in all countries around the world 

The above graph shows the change in cancer death rates around the world

The above shows where cancer is the leading cause of premature death

Olivia Munn, 43, reveals she has been diagnosed with breast cancer

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The ACS estimates about 153,000 colorectal cancer cases will be detected this year, including 19,500 among those under 50 years old.

Approximately 53,000 people are expected to die from the disease.

As experts look to fight the epidemic, it was recently announced that a blood test to screen for colon cancer performed well in a study. 

The test, made by Guardant Health, is not FDA-approved but is anticipated to be this year. 

It looks for DNA fragments of tumor cells and precancerous growths and is for sale in the US for $895. 

In the recent study, it caught 83 percent of cancers, but doctors still recommend people receive a colonoscopy - the gold screening standard - at varying ages based on their own risk factors.

Around the world, breast cancer is the disease seen most commonly in dozens of countries, including the US, UK, Canada, India, South Africa, Australia and Mexico, which may be due to more accessible screenings.

It is followed by prostate cancer, according to the World Health Organization. 

To tackle the epidemic, researchers are beginning to collaborate between multiple countries to explore the subject, but experts stress that decades of data is going to need to be analyzed before the true reason is revealed.  

Epidemiologist Barbara Cohn at the Public Health Institute in Oakland, California, said cancers can arise years after exposure to a possible carcinogen, such as cigarettes or chemicals. 

She said: 'If the latent period is decades, then where do you look? We believe that you need to look as early as possible in life to understand this.'

Black Panther actor Chadwick Boseman died in 2020 at the age of 43 from colon cancer

In order to do that, scientists are looking to collect 60 years of data on thousands of people who have developed early-onset cancer around the world  

A preliminary review of biological samples from expectant mothers dating back to 1959, whose children the researchers have followed since, found a possible connection between early-onset colon cancer and exposure in the womb to a synthetic version of the hormone progesterone, which is sometimes used to prevent a pre-term birth. 

Dr Edward Kim, chief physician at City of Hope, a top cancer hospital in California, called cancer in young people 'a growing epidemic that we are observing in the clinic.' 

Oncologists there told CBS the rates of cancer in young people under 50 are highest for breast, colon and lung cancers. 

While screenings have increased in some areas and cancer deaths in the US have fallen - though experts say the decline is not fast enough - cases of some cancers still continue to rise. 

Brandon Arbini, 41, was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer and had to have one foot of his colon removed. 

He told CBS: 'Cancer, especially colon cancer, is not a disease of the elderly anymore. It's happening to more and more young people.'

Other cancers on the rise include uterine cancer - with rates rising two percent since the mid-1990s in people younger than 50, according to an article published by Nature. 

Juliette Landgrave, diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer at 38 years old, said she has seen women as young as 20 years old with the same disease. 

Early-onset breast cancer cases increased by four percent each year between 2016 and 2019 - though deaths from the disease have fallen.

Landgrave said: 'I've seen in my triple negative cancer groups women that are 20; just starting their lives, being diagnosed with this horrible disease. So, I'm lucky that I was able to feel the lump and I was able to advocate for myself.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13197079/cancer-epidemic-young-people-america-uk-india-south-africa.html

What’s Wrong with the US Welfare State?

 Here are two surprising facts about welfare and poverty in the United States: (1) we are spending an enormous amount of money on people at the bottom of the income ladder and 2) all that spending does a very poor job of meeting human needs.

And here is a surprising opportunity: if we took all of the money we are currently spending on anti-poverty programs and gave it in cash to poor families, there would be no problem of poverty in this country.

We might still have some homelessness – reflecting mental illness or drug abuse. But conventional poverty would be a thing of the past.

Calculating the Resources Families Have

In their book The Myth of American Inequality former senator Phil Gramm and his colleagues point out that determining who is poor and how poor they are is quite complicated. Here is how they did it.

First, they divide the population into quintiles, based on household earned income (mainly wages). They then calculate each quintile’s total income after all taxes and all transfer payments. Transfers are Medicaid, food stamps, housing subsidies, etc.; and there are 95 such programs in all. They count each dollar of transfer spending as equivalent to a dollar of earned income.

The economists were then able to determine how much is available for consumption in each of the quintiles. Because household size differs from quintile to quintile, they divided that amount by the number of people in each household to get per capita “income.”

Comparisons on the Income Ladder

The first important finding: the bottom fifth of households in 2017 had an average (after tax and after transfer) income of $33,653 per person. As I show below, almost all of this “income” is in the form of noncash welfare benefits. But if all those benefits were converted to cash, a family of four in the bottom fifth of the (earned) income distribution would have $134,652 a year to spend, after taxes!

The second important finding: The per capita income of second fifth in 2017 was $29,497; and for the middle fifth it was $32,574.

Those with the least earned income had more actual total income than those in the next two higher quintiles! The average household in the bottom fifth received 14 percent more income than the average second-fifth household and 3.3 percent more than the average middle-income household.

So, if people in the bottom fifth of the income distribution are consuming more each year than those who are supposedly better off, why is there a problem?

Why Cash Matters

Most of the income received by middle-income families is cash income that people earn in the labor market. With their after-tax income, people are able to spend in ways that maximize their well-being.

That’s not true at the bottom of the income ladder.

Since the War on Poverty started in 1965, the labor force participation of the bottom one-fifth of households has dropped from 70 percent to 36 percent. As a group, this one-fifth now receive more than 90 percent of their income from government. For this group, our welfare system has substituted in-kind benefits for labor market income.

Medicaid money goes to doctors, hospitals, and other suppliers of medical services. Food stamp money goes to agribusiness. Education subsidies go to teachers and the public-school bureaucracy. Housing subsidies go to landlords. Throughout most of its history, War on Poverty programs gave very little cash to poor people.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that if you give money to impersonal bureaucracies, it is more likely to be spent in ways that benefit bureaucrats rather than in ways that benefit poor families.

Studies show that Medicaid enrollees value Medicaid as little as 20 cents on the dollar. That means that they would in principle sell their Medicaid insurance if you offered a cash payment equal to as little as one fifth of the program’s actual cost.

Falling through the safety net

The other day I Googled “emergency medical care near me” and got two dozen or so nonhospital options near my home in Dallas, Texas. Not one of them had the word “Medicaid” in their initial message. I understand that some of these facilities will take Medicaid. But none of them are located in the part of the city where most Medicaid enrollees live. Obviously, they are not anxious to attract Medicaid patients.

About the same time as my GoogleGOOG +2% search, an article in the Dallas Morning News described South Dallas as a “medical desert,” despite the fact that this is the area of the city with the highest prevalence of chronic disease. In a normal market, venders go where the need for their product is greatest. But neither private nor government medical service providers have any interest in South Dallas.

To meet the health needs of this area, a nonprofit entity has been established.

There are an estimated 1,400 federally funded community health centers in the United States, serving the health needs of one in every 11 people in the country. These are mainly, people who are uninsured or on Medicaid. Moreover, at the very same time that the federal governing was expanding community health centers, states were also expanding Medicaid enrollment as a result of the Affordable Care Act.

Although it was predicted that Medicaid enrollment would reduce the use of emergency room use, the opposite has been true. Medicaid insurance causes people to increase their emergency room visits by 40 percent.

Nationwide, the average time a person can expect to spend in an emergency room is a little more than 3 hours. At a safety net facility like Parkland Hospital in Dallas it is almost 6 hours.

The number of community health centers is roughly equal to the number of private walk-in clinics, such as MinuteClinic in CVS pharmacies. Yet, if MinuteClinics can meet the needs of the nonpoor, why can’t they do the same for the poor? And if ordinary insurance can give the non-poor all kinds of options in the medical marketplace, why can’t Medicaid do the same for the poor?

Another article in the Dallas Morning News announced that one in five Texas children experienced hunger, and bemoaned the fact the state was missing out on a $450 million federal grant for summer-time food for kids because of bureaucratic inertia.

But why do we even need that program? Remember, the family of each of these kids is supposed to have the equivalent of $33,653 per year to spend on the child’s needs – with 90 percent of it provided by government!

A Better Way

Writing in the New York TimesNYT +0.7%, MIT economist Amy Finkelstein proposed an alternative. Take the $600 billion we spend on Medicaid every year and give it to poor families in the form of cash.

I would require the recipients to contract with a primary care doctor of their choosing to provide 24/7 “concierge care,” put the remainder in a Health Savings Account (HSA), and allow any remaining HSA funds (after a period of time) to be withdrawn for nonmedical spending.

We could do something similar for food stamps, housing subsidies and a raft of other government programs. If we did all that poverty in the United States would vanish in a heartbeat.

https://www.goodmaninstitute.org/2024/03/07/whats-wrong-with-the-us-welfare-state/

America the Snackable

 by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

There is only one pathway to health and sanity: stop consuming snackables of any kind.

Everything in America has become snackable: devoid of value, easily consumed, intentionally addictive, and ultimately destructive to all that is healthy for individuals, communities and society at large.

The core features of edible snackables are self-evident yet worthy of a closer look due to the severity of the consequences:

1. The snack is made of highly processed ingredients.

2. The snack has high concentrations of sugar, salt and unhealthy oils/fats.

3. The snack has low nutritional value (empty calories) and is not beneficial to health.

4. The snack is packaged in small quantities so the price appears cheap but is revealed as expensive when converted to price per pound.

5. The snack's "serving size" may be deceptively presented: a 4-ounce package may have a calorie count based on a "serving size" of 2 ounces, as if the package contains two servings when everyone knows a single individual will consume the entire snack.

6. The snack is a legal addictive product as the snack has been designed to hijack humans' innate receptors for sugar, salt and fat and satisfying mouthfeel. (Bet ya can't have just one.)

Highly processed, highly addictive, low nutritional value foods are a key driver of America's declining health. All these foods share the same characteristics of the manufactured snackables: they are heavily marketed, highly profitable and contribute to obesity and metabolic disorders.

When only one-quarter of the adult populace is normal weight, this leads to a host of chronic health disorders including higher risks of heart disease and many cancers, as well as the spectrum of metabolic disorders such as diabetes and prediabetes. Here are the facts: over 73% of adult Americans are overweight or obese.

Given that almost 3/4 of adult Americans are overweight or obese, it shouldn't surprise us that 52% of adult Americans are diabetic or prediabetic. This is a sobering trend, one that won't be reversed by $1,000 a month weight-loss medications which cease to be effective once they're no longer consumed. These medications don't change the patients' diets from highly processed foods to only unprocessed real food, and so the benefits are inherently narrower than advertised.

The snack and beverage aisles take up an astounding amount of space in America's specialty-groceries and supermarkets. These are the profit-generators, and so the processed-food manufacturers and grocery retailers are constantly seeking to entice more addicts with new novelties. For example: Trader Joe's Has Been Releasing A Ton Of New Products Lately.

Consuming this kind of high-fat, empty-calorie snack isn't going to generate a healthy lifestyle.

The marketing of novelty is as refined and devoid of value as the snacks being manufactured and sold:

As those with any knowledge and experience of fitness know, the notion that it's possible to burn off the empty calories of snacks with a bit more exercise is a fantasy--hence America's bulging waistlines and declining health.

The enormous profitability of edible snacks is mirrored in all the other manifestations of America the Snackable: our daily lives are now composed of one bite-sized addictive snack of social media, novelty memes, political opinion, financial data-snacks and pundits' opinions and snackable videos after another.

Attention spans and the ability to grasp complex issues have withered to snack-size, and whatever is being marketed as "ideas" are as devoid of value as an empty-calorie snack.

All share the same characteristics: they are addictive, bite-sized, packaged deceptively, marketed as novelty, devoid of value, destructive to human health and most importantly, astoundingly profitable. So the edible snacks generate chronic illnesses which then provide fodder for highly profitable medications, while the inherently deranging snackables of social media, videos, entertainment, political opinions and memes-du-jour fuel mental disorders which provide fodder for a vast spectrum of highly profitable medications.

There is only one pathway to health and sanity: stop consuming snackables of any kind. Yes, the only solution is cold turkey, baby, and like all addictions, it's painful at first, and then it becomes a great relief to be freed of the addictions.

https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/america-snackable