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It's a nice theory, but cancers aren't completely self sufficient. They need to form blood vessels to grow any larger than a pin head and early sponge-like organisms certainly didn't have those.

http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/grow/how-a-cancer-gets-its-blood-supply

The only possible reason you've heard

absolutely no science to back that statement up.

is either because you are deaf, dumb, or lazy. The research is pretty clear. Flying causes skin cancer, but has little to no effect on the incidence of other kinds of cancer. Thirty seconds of google-fu brings up:

http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/about-cancer/cancer-questions/airline-staff-and-cancer

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC124549/

http://oem.bmj.com/content/57/3/175.abstract

The RFA ('burning') technique is in fact already being applied to certain types of cancer in the kidney, liver and lung:

http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/help/default.asp?page=23208

It can actually be less invasive than standard surgery.

MRI-guided surgical manipulators of one kind or another are also being developed for other applications (e.g., the lab working on the breast cancer system also has funding to develop a brain surgery device).

You said, "I should say that Claude Wischik thinks he *does* know what causes Alzheimer's disease. He's sure that tau tangles cause it."

But what causes tau tangles?

Fraud? In my opinion, at the very least the BBC story is very badly written. In my opinion, there are elements of fraud. If I were the manager of "Emma Wilkinson, Health reporter, BBC News" I would review her work to try to discover if she has been taking money to advertise drugs. I would consider firing her, or at least re-assigning her to less demanding writing projects.

Quote from the BBC article: "Rember, or methylthioninium chloride, is the first treatment specifically designed to target the Tau tangles." There was no "design". The effect was discovered entirely because of a laboratory accident with a common laboratory chemical. Quote from the BBC article: "Methylthioninium chloride is more commonly used as a blue dye in laboratory experiments. Professor Wischik discovered it by accident 20 years ago, when a drop in a test tube led to the disappearance of the Tau protein he had been working on."

It seems a bit odd that, if Professor Wischik discovered the effect 20 years ago, there is an investigation of the effect only now. Why the delay? What happened?

Cancer? The BBC article should have mentioned that the laboratory chemical they are now calling "Rember" is an aniline dye, that aniline dyes cause cancer, and that has been known for a long time. Quote from that web page: "A group of chemicals called arylamines are known to cause bladder cancer. These chemicals have been banned in the UK for about 20 years. But it can take up to 25 years for a bladder cancer to develop. You may have been exposed to them a long time ago if you work in industries such as rubber or plastics manufacture. Arylamines that increase risk of bladder cancer include * Aniline dyes ...".

What that quote doesn't say is that direct chemical exposure can cause cancer immediately. How is it possible that "chemicals have been banned in the UK for about 20 years" can be given to people in the U.K. as a drug?

The title of the BBC article is NOT "Alzheimer's drug halts decline". It is "Alzheimer's drug 'halts' decline", but people with no professional writing experience will almost certainly miss the significance of the single quotes, which mean that a claim is merely being made, and the claim is not a verified fact.

The BBC article contains 539 words total. Of those, 243 words, more than half, are quotes. It seems that much of the article may have been taken from a PR release, with little or no critical thinking.

Calling the dye "Rember" encourages those with no scientific training in the field to believe that it will help them "Remember".

There are other odd aspects of the BBC article. The article says, "Trials of the drug, known as Rember, in 321 patients showed an 81% difference in rate of mental decline compared with those not taking the treatment." Does that mean there continues to be mental decline, but the decline is slower?

Later the article says, "Patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease were given either 30, 60 or 100mg of the drug or a placebo. The 60mg dose produced the most pronounced effect - over 50 weeks there was a seven-point difference on a scale used to measure severity of dementia." How many points total are on the scale? Isn't that odd, that the 60 milligram dose worked better than a 100 milligram dose? How much better? Doesn't that say that there were really 3 trials, and one of the dosage levels was by chance statistically better than the others, so it was chosen to report the results?

The BBC article says, "At 19 months there was no significant decline in mental function in patients taking the drug, the researchers said."

doesn't matter if they plug this particular loophole. there a few others: radioactive waste and medical equipment. doesn't have to be from this country, ship it in in a lead lined cargo container. oh, we inspect all of those, right?

take a white van, pack it with TNT and strontium-90 from radiotherapy equipment or nuclear waste/ nuclear plant parts and set it off in times square. doesn't have to cause a lot of damage. the real "bomb" is the psychological and economic bomb: no one will want to go to midtown manhattan anymore

after the explosion which would kill a half dozen people and shatter some windows (nothing, right?), you'd have reporters walking around with geiger counters, and talking about the half-life of strontium-90 (28 years). 5.5 years after 9/11, we are still talking about the air quality issue of the particles of concrete and steel and diesel fuel and aluminum and asbestos. that's all washed away by now. but radioactive contamination doesn't work that way. it sticks around for decades

in other words, you can kill a bunch of people. ok, they are gone, done for. case closed. people grieve, people move on. psychologically, it's cut and dry. but you can do another kind of bomb, something more sinister and insidious: you can damage a society more by introducing a permanent nagging environmental degradation in the form of low level radiation. this is far more damaging economically and psychologically. it's scandalous, it's a permanent nag in your head, not something you get over. and that's the whole point of terrorism: the instilling of terror. terrorists can't kill us all, but they can influence our thinking. to paraphrase stalin ("a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic"): the endless fretting over a nonquantifiable and continuous degradation to your health for years is perhaps more terrorizing than outright killing someone

that's why a dirty bomb is so nasty a concept, and why we should worry about it

If the answer is not very deep then you couldn't treat stuff like cervical cancer or colon cancer, because you can't stick electrodes (comfortably?) onto those body parts.

It's not comfortable, but it's nicer than dying. It's called brachytherapy.

ummm...i think the real risk is the METAL. You know, you don't want metal objects being sheared away internally. Actually, this site (search for pacemaker) seems to say just that. And I trust that place the a slashdot person on Apr. 1.

Well, I disagree with the statement about the FDA, but that's an argument for another time. Other sources include: MHRA http://www.mhra.gov.uk/home/idcplg?IdcService=SS_G ET_PAGE&nodeId=433&within=Yes&keywords=laetrile/, Cancer Research UK: http://www.cancerhelp.org.uk/help/default.asp?page =21859/ and the USA National Cancer Research Institute http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/pdq/cam/laetril e/Patient/page2/.

The wikipedia article linked previously also has a good summary.

I know you're joking, but I think that might be a valid complaint. What immediately came to my mind, and the article mentions this point, is the recent SCID treatment using a viral vector where a bunch of the patients unexpectedly ended up with leukemia, which you might say is the extreme opposite of immunodeficiency.

Also, it's a Phase I trial with five (5) patients, so while it's encouraging to hear about such a development, don't keep your hopes too high. Call me when Phase II is successful!

I know you won't enjoy your palliative treatment. Here's another 1,700,000 or so articles about a slow, painful death.

I know, you were joking. It's not funny when you work with the victims.

I guess the main point is that microwaves are classified as "non-ionising" radiation. That is, they dont contain enough energy to break mollecular bonds, thus our cells are generally safe from damage and mutation. The only non-ionising radiation which we know causes problems is ultraviolet.

see this site for a good summary.

So, the main effect of radio waves is heating, and at 30mW per device spread out over a room, it's pretty weak.

Before you get too paranoid, radio and microwaves have less energy than visible light, and when outside you are getting hammered by 1000W per square metre.

Asbestos exposure leads to Mesothelioma usually. Small cell lung cancer has been long suspected as being a direct result of cigarette smoking, but asbestos is also a possibility.