age and cancer

Maroc (maroc@islandnet.com)
Sun, 19 Dec 1999 15:52:20 +0000

Hugh Lovel is on track and Dale has succumbed to an "urban legend" claiming
increased life expectancy. Dale is a scientist and can be expected to use
and be used by mathematical statistics. Are we living longer than out
ancestors who started coming to North America 500 years ago? Never mind
the statistics just look around you. Are there people walking the shopping
malls who are more than 100 years old? The fact is when individuals pass
the biblical "three score and ten" they are old and within 20 years they
will nearly all be read. The same was true among the people in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony in the1630's. A couple of dramatic things have
occurred. As cities grew during the 18th and 19th centuries it became very
dangerous to be a child. For instance, during the last half of the 19th
century Montreal became the most dangerous place to be born, 3 of 5
children born died before they were 5 years old, most before they finished
their first year. You don't have to be much of a mathematician to figure
out what that does to the "average" statistical life expectancy. The
second thing that skewed the figures was that many child-bearing women
succumbed before middle age, some exhausted by annual births, some because
of the nale doctors dirty hands. The fact is that human lifespan has
changed little since humans were invented. I can fully understand why Dale
would like to believe the cause of the rapidly increasing rate of cancers
is due to all of us living longer. After all it would require a major
change in his assessment of our economic/social reality to consider that
the "Green Revolution" has been an ecological and health disaster.

Don Maroc
Vancouver Island, Canada

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