The upsurge in cancer in this age is at least partly a consequence of better medical care. In short, people are living longer, and encountering more instances where increased longevity places them in an age/risk group where far fewer were alive decades ago.
More recently, and perhaps more controversially, a huge increase in knowledge about micro organisms is leading to an understanding that our current blanket approach to slaughtering everything in sight is having perhaps as many negative consequences as positive. Many of those organisms appear to play a crucial role and targeted in allowing and maintaining good health. This includes organisms that detect and destroy precancerous cellular growth long before medicine can even diagnose it. They operate on a far more delicate and specific pathway to counteract particular ailments than the preceding broad spectrum approaches. They also enlist and sensitize the autoimmune system in ways we are just beginning to understand, including preconditioning that system, and tuning it in the moments during and immediately after birth. It even appears that the practice of caesarean birth may severely disrupt that process' natural path. It may be possible that humanity's included microflora and microfauna might submit to intelligent management and cultivation, and may provide new insight and opportunity to assist in the fight with many cancers and other immune disorders.
This field is still in its earliest infancy.
The human body is far more than its internal organic systems; it is also a collection of symbiotic microorganisms that have become part of the overall system over tens of thousands of generations, without which the overall system cannot function effectively. Taken as a whole, the 'human' cells only constitute a minority within that whole. Cancer may even constitute an unintended response to our previous wholesale, broad spectrum targeting of pathogens and benign organisms alike. Our concoction of antibiotics has followed a path of finding something that destroys specific pathogens; but the real question may be, what else is being stuck down with those broad, broad swords? Are we decimating the real, genuinely effective allies whose presence and purposes we don't even understand? Is deciphering and defining the human genome the end, or the beginning, of the process that understands and aids human health?
Greg
