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Women are at much higher risk for contracting lung cancer and for women who have never smoked the rate of developing lung cancer is on the rise.

The American Association for Cancer Research has found that lung cancer tumors in non-smokers are different than tumors in smokers and they are trying to determine why.

The World Health Organization, WHO, recently classified diesel fumes as carcinogenic.

This might explain the rise along with other environmental factors.

“Not only has there been an increase in the number of women and non-smokers contracting the disease, but there has also been an increase in the number of cases diagnosed in stage 4 of the illness,” lead researcher Dr. Chrystèle Locher said in a statement.
This change — 58 percent with stage 4 in 2010 compared with 43 percent in 2000 — might reflect new classifications of different stages of the disease, the researchers said. They also found big changes in the type of cancer being diagnosed. The rate of people developing adenocarcinoma, a form of non-small cell lung cancer, jumped from 35.8 percent to 53.5 percent over the decade.

As Western lifestyle habits extend into developing countries, so too, do the diseases which come with them.

In a paper from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France the findings indicate that along with a rise in living standards, cancer will be on the rise.

A 75 percent increase in cancer by 2030 is expected in the developing world.

The researchers said that rising living standards in less developed countries would probably lead to a decrease in the number of infection-related cancers. But it was also likely there would also be an increase in types of the disease usually seen in richer countries.
They predicted that middle-income countries such as China, India and Africa could see an increase of 78 percent in the number of cancer cases by 2030.
Cases in less developed regions were expected to see a 93 percent rise over the same period, said the paper published in the journal Lancet Oncology.
Those rises would more than offset signs of a decline in cervical, stomach and other kinds of cancer in wealthier nations, said the researchers.

The most common types of cancer in the world are lung cancer, female breast cancer, colorectal cancer, stomach cancer, prostate cancer, liver cancer and cervical cancer.

TB that resists antibiotic treatment is causing problems in India.

Over crowded living conditions, poor hygiene, ill-informed medical staff are and over use of antibiotics are fueling the already rampant problem.

The risk of drug resistant disease becoming pandemic is one of the Greatest concerns of the World Health Organization.

The problem of evolving TB drug resistance has been brewing for years. In the early 1990s, multidrug-resistant TB began spreading in New York City, abetted by homelessness, prison outbreaks and HIV. Aggressive identification and treatment of these cases, including the direct observation of patients taking their pills, snuffed out that epidemic.

In 2005, extensively drug-resistant TB — strains untreatable with the three first-line drugs and several second-choice medications — cropped up in the South African province of Kwazulu-Natal, again abetted by HIV, which devastates immune defenses.

The U.N. could be influenced by special interest groups who have a financial stake in keeping the population ill.

“There are clear conflicts for the corporations that contribute to and profit from the sales of alcoholic beverages, foods with high fat, salt, and sugar contents, and tobacco products — all of which are important causes of NCDs,” they wrote.

“Failure to address these concerns will undermine the development of competent policy … and the confidence the global community and the public at large have in the UN’s and WHO’s ability to govern and advance public health.”

Called New Delhi metallobeta-lactamase, or NDM-1 for short, the enzyme destroys carbapenems, an important group of antibiotics used for difficult infections in hospitals, and has been found in a wide variety of bacterial types.

Although there is no threat to the U.S as of the yet, the developement of new antibiotics to fight superbugs has come to a halt.

If these bugs spread we are certainly at risk for a disaster and a threat to modern medicine as we know it.

Read the full article for all the details.

Some experts warn health-care provision is in danger of reverting back to a pre-antibiotic era in which hip replacements, care of preterm babies and advanced cancer treatment are no longer possible.

Abuse of antibiotic use in helthcare and livestock has increased superbug resistance to these therapies.