Brazil’s cancer curse

http://mosaicscience.com/story/brazils-cancer-curse

by tomkwok • 11 years ago

69 29 11 years ago

Grazester• 11 years ago

This is an interesting article. I knew of a family that was nearly all wiped out by cancer. One family member was my sister's best friend. She had leukaemia and died at 13. Her younger brother and sister both lived into their early 30's but both died of cancer. Their elder half sister(on the father's side) died of cancer along with their mother(thought the cancer gene was on the dad side).

I did think it was like a curse indeed.

chromano3• 11 years ago

You know what is interesting? In the city I currently live (São Carlos, an inner city in the state of São Paulo, Brasil), there's a 20 years old research that is helping victims of cancer with a new drug. The idea is pretty simple, but unfortunately I don't have a source in english, so the following is in portuguese:

http://www.jornalciencia.com/saude/mente/5372-brasileiro-ter...

Here's the interesting part though, the Brazilian government and even ANVISA (Brazilian Health Surveillance Agency) are not giving a fuck about his discovery, thus the researcher is covering the costs of fabrication of drug and giving it away for free.

Thousands of people from all the country is coming to my city for this drug -- people who used it before says it is a miracle, it really works.

I guess the media can help pressing the government/ANVISA, and it is what is already happening (very slowly though). I hope this text I'm writing spread his discovery further and someway reach someone who can help us. I'm here for whatever questions you have and I will do my best in answering them.

Please share.

JoeAltmaier2• 11 years ago

This sounds exactly like every quack scam out there. The mean old medical authorities are ignoring me! They must be jealous. Yeah, that's it.

chromano3• 11 years ago

Except the researcher is distributing the drug without charging for it. He's not interested in the money.

msandford• 11 years ago

This is also a well documented phenomena in the US if the compound isn't patent-able. You gotta get the $50mm to get it through the FDA from somewhere, and if there are no patents there's literally zero years before the generics come out.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140925/08202528637/crowd...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichloroacetic_acid

So if this guy doesn't want to play ball with a pharmaceutical company, it's entirely likely that his research could go under-reported or under-utilized for many years.

Now of course, these facts don't MAKE his story true. Just that your offhand dismissal of the possibility of it being true isn't quite so rock solid.

throwaway1967• 11 years ago

JoeAltmaier you are breaching the negativity rules.

You're just being negative here by willfully ignoring that said doctor is giving the drug away for free, which is not the usual modus operandi of quack doctors.

StartledGoat• 11 years ago

What's the name of the drug? (My Portuguese is non-existent)

mishakorolev• 11 years ago

My Portuguese is terrible, but enough to parse that. The drug appears to be "fosfoetanolamina sintética" or synthetic Phosphorylethanolamine, which its Wikipedia page seems to say that it has anti cancer uses. As I have no bio chem or medical background I can't evaluate that claim.

The article says that it is formed by combining mono -ethanolamine with phosforic acid.

Asbostos2• 11 years ago

With at least 10,000 people he must be sitting on an amazing pile of data. Has he published it? If not, why not? If the patients aren't being tracked to check their progress, or at least their identity to find when they die, then his efforts are kind of wasted because nobody will trust anecdotes.

gus_massa• 11 years ago

From the article:

A fosfoetanolamina, atualmente, possui dados experimentais concluídas de fase I, II e III.

The problem with the press coverage is that it has too few information. In this case it sounds too good to be true. Usually the drug is useful against some kind of cancers, but not against others. (For example, useful against fast growing cancers, but not useful against slow growing cancers.) I want a link to the a fase III study to see the relevant information.

Most press coverage have a few success stories, for example someone that had a 20% reduction of the cancer in the last months. (Usually it's a measurement problem, they take two images with slightly different methods, and the second image look smaller.) It's extremely suspicious that this article doesn't even have one of this anecdotes.

bsbechtel• 11 years ago

On a completely unrelated note, I just moved to São Carlos, and am looking to connect with the tech community here. Could you contact me via the email in my profile, and we could talk further?

napsterbr• 11 years ago

Hey, we have a gaming startup here in São Carlos. Happy to go out for a few beers. A place you might like is Bridge Coworking[0], though I do not know them.

Couldn't find your email (it's hidden by default), but you can reach me at renato at hackerexperience dot com.

[0] http://bridge.sc/

goshx2• 11 years ago

Here is his resume including links to published scientific papers: http://buscatextual.cnpq.br/buscatextual/visualizacv.do?id=K...

goshx2• 11 years ago

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v109/n11/full/bjc2013510a....

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332213...

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0753332212...

ackfoo• 11 years ago

Southeastern Brazil sits most directly under the SAA, which increases background levels of ionizing radiation for those in the geographic area.

If there existed a map of these Li-Fraumeni variant cases, which it seems there does not, it would be interesting to compare that with the position of the SAA.

It seems reasonable that a P53 mutation combined with higher background radiation would lead to increased cancer risk in those with the mutation, so the location in southeast Brazil seems like it might not be a coincidence.

One also has to wonder if the P53 mutation itself is an artifact of high-Z exposure, even though it looks to be identical in all cases, but the genetics may rule that out.

It may be that the Brazilian Li-Fraumeni variant situation gives us our only model of cancer risk in a low geomagnetic field environment, which is very interesting for human space exploration.

dekhn• 11 years ago

It's more likely the P53 mutation came from a Founder (individual who had the mutation quite some time ago) that passed it on to many individuals. Whether that original mutation was caused by a higher than average level of ionizing radiation is entirely speculative. This does not rule out increased cancer rates due to unrepaired ionizing radiation damage that went unrepaired to mutant P53, although that is also pretty speculative (I mean, it's a known fact that happens, but it's also not particularly necessary to explain the observations here).

The part about cancer risk models and geomagnetic fields and space exploration are a tangent, and not even a relevant or scientifically plausible one.

barking• 11 years ago

SAA = South Atlantic Anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Atlantic_Anomaly I'd never heard of it before

magic_beans• 11 years ago

What does SAA mean? All I get from google is South African Airways...

dredmorbius• 11 years ago

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA -- please define your acronyms) was also the focus of the high altitude ("space bomb") nuclear explosion tests of Operation Argus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Argus

a series of United States nuclear weapons tests and missile tests secretly conducted during August and September 1958 over the South Atlantic Ocean. They were performed by the Defense Nuclear Agency, in conjunction with the Explorer 4 space mission....

The tests were proposed by Nicholas Christofilos of what was then the Livermore branch of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory (now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) as a means to verify the Christofilos effect, which argued that high-altitude nuclear detonations would create a radiation belt in the extreme upper regions of the Earth's atmosphere. Such belts would be similar in effect to the Van Allen radiation belts. Such radiation belts were viewed as having possible tactical use in war. Prior to Argus, Hardtack Teak had shown disruption of radio communications from a nuclear blast, though this was not due to the creation of radiation belts....

Due to the South Atlantic Anomaly, the Van Allen radiation belt is closer to the Earth's surface at that location. The (extreme) altitude of the tests was chosen so as to prevent personnel involved in the test from being exposed to any ionizing radiation.

This and other space-based testing destroyed several satellites, including the first communications satellite, Telstar, which failed after only seven months.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telstar

A memo concerning the failure of a British satellite, Ariel-1, recently surfaced and was reported by the BBC:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150910-the-nuke-that-fried...

ape4• 11 years ago

Sad but true. I suppose families with a high cancer rate will die off - evolution.

Asbostos2• 11 years ago

The article mentions that this isn't happening here and that's the problem. It's not so severe that families die off but is severe enough to cause a lot of ongoing casualties.

MegalSlime• 11 years ago

I hope one day works like the one of Dr. Crescenti come to the light of public.

http://www.crescenti.com.ar/tratamiento/informacion-general/

stefantalpalaru• 11 years ago

a mutation in a gene called p53

The gene is called TP53 and p53 is the protein it produces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53

Brazil’s cancer curse

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