Smoking a Pack a Day Causes 150 Mutations in Every Lung Cell

Scientists have found that smoking a pack a day of cigarettes can cause 150 damaging changes to a smoker’s lung cells each year. The findings come from a study of the devastating genetic damage, or mutations, caused by smoking in various organs in the body. Publishing in the journal Science on Thursday, the researchers said the findings show a direct link between the number of cigarettes smoked in a lifetime and the number of mutations in the DNA of cancerous tumors. The highest mutation rates were seen in lung cancers,…

Read More

Why Health Care Eats More of Your Paycheck Every Year

Millions of Americans are finding out this month that the price of their health insurance is going up next year — as it did this year, last year, and most of the years before that. And it’s not just that the price is going up, it’s that it goes up faster than wages and inflation, eating away at our ability to pay for other things we want (beer, televisions, vacations) or need (rent, heat, food). Does it have to be this way? Why does health care grow so much faster…

Read More

Once the Goblins are Gone, Don’t Gobble Up Every Piece of Your Halloween Harvest

What’s scarier: running into your dentist on Halloween – and being reminded of the horrors you’re visiting on your teeth – or being a dentist? It can’t be much of a treat to decide that professional responsibility requires you to drop toothbrushes into the maws of sugar-seeking ghosts and pumpkins. “But have some compassion,” Rachel Tepper Paley writes on Bon Appétit’s website. “It’s not like Halloween, a holiday devoted to society-sanctioned cavity worship, makes life easy for a person whose life work is oral hygiene.” Paley talked to a few…

Read More

5.5 Lakh Head and Neck Cancer Cases Every Year in India: Experts

Head and neck cancers account for more than 5.5 lakh of the total cancer cases reported in India every year, putting India in the sixth place worldwide, said health experts. Quoting the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), the experts said approximately eight lakh cases are diagnosed each year, out of which 5.5 lakh cases are of head and neck cancer. “Primarily a lifestyle-related disease, such cancer is highly preventable. As much as 80 per cent of the causation is attributed to tobacco consumption, while 75 per cent is due…

Read More

​One in every four men in Aizawl facing cancer threat

  Men in Mizoram’s capital Aizawl have much higher probability of developing cancer than their counterparts in any other part of the country, an official said here on Monday. According to the Population Based Cancer Registries (PBCR), the probability of contracting any type of cancer in a lifetime (up to 74 years of age) is one in four males in Aizawl against one in seven to eight men in important cities in India. “Probability of contracting cancer among females in Aizawl is one in five persons, whereas it is one…

Read More

Air pollution claiming a life every 23 seconds in India

Future of air we breathe is nightmarish. Present stats from WHO report states 1.4 million people in India die pre-maturely due to air pollution, which accounts to one life is given up every 23 seconds. Come 2030 and fuels we use today would have made air so toxic with pollutants that it would be close to impossible to live and move without oxygen kit as a permanent burden and part of lifestyle. Renewable energy catering to humungous needs in the near future seems far sighted and for now cleaner fuels…

Read More