Cancer

All over the world, you'll find people suffering from cancer. Many of them get seriously ill; cancer is one of the most common causes of serious disease and death in the world. Many other diseases are caused by foreign substances that get inside the body, like viruses or bacteria. But when a person gets cancer, it's something that goes wrong in the body itself. And it starts in a single cell.

In order to understand what has gone wrong, we start by looking how it works when we are healthy. The cells in the body are created through division. A new normal cell lives for a while, and then it dies. It knows where it belongs, and stays there. But sometimes, cells are created that behave incorrectly.

They grow uncontrollably, divide often, and don't die as they should. Then they can form a lump of cells - a tumour. It can even happen that cells from the tumour penetrate into other tissue... ... or that cells break loose, float off, and cause tumours in other places. This is cancer.

Cell behaviour like this, is caused by changes in the genes. The genes are in the cell's nucleus and tell the cell how to behave. If the genes change - mutate - the cell gets the wrong instructions. Mutations happen all the time, and most of them are harmless. But every once in a while, a mutation causes a cell to become a cancer cell.

Mutations like these can be caused by many different things: ... stuff that we eat, drink or inhale, like alcohol or cigarette smoke... ... chemical substances around us, like petrol, smoke and some building materials... ... virus or bacterial infections, that have damaged the cells, in places like the stomach, liver or uterus... ... ionising radiation... ...

or by... nothing at all. Some cancer mutations appear by themselves, spontaneously. The risk for spontaneous mutations increases as we get older. Additionally, cancer can be heritable.

Some forms of cancer are caused by old mutations, that are passed on from generation to generation. Our own immune system can detect, attack, and kill cancer cells. But if the cancer is already well established, it can be too hard for the immune system to fight on its own. Then we need help from doctors, who can treat the cancer. They can do that through ...

surgery... ... stem cell transplants, where they replace sick cells with new healthy ones... ... ionizing radiation, aimed at the cancer cells... ... or medication that kills the cancer cells - chemotherapy. The difficulty with treatments like these is that they attack a part of one's own body.

It's important to radiate or chemically attack the cancer cells specifically, without killing too many of the body's normal healthy cells at the same time. Sometimes we can direct the immune system with medication, so that it can kill off the cancer cells more effectively. This is a new way to treat cancer, that is likely to become more common in the future. Today, about half of the people who get cancer survive, and the research is progressing quickly. But since cancer can be caused by so many different things, and present itself so differently, it's not likely that we will ever eradicate it completely.

At least not for a long, long while. Even if we don't eradicate cancer, there are simple things we can do to reduce the risk of getting sick. If we... stop smoking ... drink no - or only a moderate amount of - alcohol ...

refrain from eating large quantities of red meat, especially processed meat, like sausage, ham and bacon. ... eat more fruits, vegetables and fibre ... exercise more ... get a moderate amount of sunshine ... then the number of people getting cancer will be reduced by a third!

Pretty good, isn't it?