Cancer

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares93 Views

    Joe Biden diagnosed with ‘aggressive form’ of prostate cancer, his office says

    by

    Joe Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which has spread to the bone, and the former president and his family are reviewing treatment options, his office said in a statement on Sunday.“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” his office said. “The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”Prostate cancers are given a score called a Gleason score that measures, on a scale of one to 10, how the cancerous cells look compared with normal cells. Biden’s office said his score was nine, suggesting his cancer is among the most aggressive.When prostate cancer spreads to other parts of the body, it often spreads to the bones. Metastasized cancer is much harder to treat than localized cancer because it can be hard for drugs to reach all the tumors and completely root out the disease.However, when prostate cancers need hormones to grow, as in Biden’s case, they can be susceptible to treatment that deprives the tumors of hormones.Biden, 82, beat an incumbent Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election and initially sought a rematch with him last year. But, amid questions about his age and mental acuity, he dropped out of the race and endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, to succeed him.Trump, who is just three years younger than Biden, subsequently defeated Harris in November’s election and returned to the White House in January.Biden has dealt with cancer before. Prior to starting his presidency, he had several non-melanoma skin cancers surgically removed, and he had a cancerous lesion removed from his chest in February 2023.In the US, prostate cancer is the most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death among men, according to the American Cancer Society.In 2022, Biden made a “cancer moonshot” one of his administration’s priorities, with the goal of halving the cancer death rate over the next 25 years. The initiative was a continuation of his work as vice-president to address a disease that had killed his older son, Beau.Reuters and the Associated Press contributed reporting. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares170 Views

      in Elections

      F.D.A. Approves First At-Home Alternative to the Pap Smear

      by

      The tool will allow women to screen for HPV, which causes almost all cases of cervical cancer, without visiting a doctor.The Food and Drug Administration approved the United States’ first at-home cervical cancer screening tool on Friday, a decision that stands to give women an accessible alternative to Pap smears, which many find painful or traumatic.The new test, made by Teal Health, involves swabbing the vagina with a spongelike tool rather than inserting a speculum and scraping cells from the cervix, as doctors do in Pap smears.Similar vaginal tests were approved last year for use in medical offices. But the at-home version could help women who have trouble finding, traveling to or making time for an in-person appointment.The approval is a result of a process that began with the discovery decades ago that the human papillomavirus, commonly known as HPV, causes almost all cervical cancer cases, and that people who don’t have the virus are at virtually no risk.Armed with that information, many doctors started testing Pap smear samples for HPV in addition to analyzing cervical cells under a microscope. Some medical authorities shifted to recommend HPV testing as the primary screening method, which opened the door for vaginal tests, because the virus can be detected in vaginal as well as cervical cells.Cervical cancer experts told The New York Times that the evidence for at-home testing was strong, and studies show it to be about as accurate as Pap smears.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      First Black Republican congresswoman honored in Utah memorial service

      by

      Family and friends of the former US congresswoman Mia Love gathered Monday in Salt Lake City to honor the life and legacy of the first Black Republican woman elected to Congress after she died of brain cancer last month aged 49.The former lawmaker from Utah, a daughter of Haitian immigrants, had undergone treatment for an aggressive brain tumor called glioblastoma and received immunotherapy as part of a clinical trial. She died on 23 March at her home in Saratoga Springs, Utah, weeks after her daughter announced she was no longer responding to treatment.Hundreds of mourners entered her service from a walkway lined with American flags at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Institute of Religion on the University of Utah campus. Long tables displayed framed family photos and bouquets of red and white flowers.Love served only two terms in Congress before suffering a razor-thin loss to Democrat Ben McAdams in the 2018 midterm elections as Democrats surged. Yet she left her mark on Utah’s political scene and later leveraged her prominence into becoming a political commentator for CNN.She was briefly considered a rising star in the GOP, but her power within the party fizzled out as Donald Trump took hold. Love kept her distance from the US president and called him out in 2018 for vulgar comments he made about immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador and some African nations.Jason Love, her husband, drew laughter from the somber crowd at Monday’s service when he told stories of his wife’s “superpowers”.View image in fullscreenHe described discovering her influence after he tried to return the many toasters the couple received as wedding gifts and failing because he didn’t have receipts. His wife then entered the store and came out three minutes later with cash in hand.“I thought: ‘Wow, I have married a Jedi knight,’” he said with a laugh.Her motherhood, he said, was her greatest superpower.“She was an extraordinary mother, and she believed that the most important work she would do within her life was within the walls of her own home with her children,” Jason Love said. “She always made it a special place for each of them to feel loved and to begin to achieve their full potential.”A choir of Love’s friends sang some of her favorite hymns, as well as Ed Sheeran’s Supermarket Flowers. Her children, Alessa, Abigale and Peyton, read an op-ed their mother published in the Deseret News shortly before she died in which she shared her enduring wish for the country to become less divisive.Love’s sister Cyndi Brito shared childhood memories, including how Love used to rehearse all day and night for starring roles in her school plays. She was always the best at everything she did and made everyone around her feel important, her sister said.Brito read an excerpt of a speech her third-grade daughter gave at a recent school assembly for Black History Month honoring Love’s legacy.“Mia Love played many roles and had many titles, but the most important role and the most important title that Mia Love played in my eyes was auntie,” Brito recalled her daughter, Carly, telling classmates.Love did not emphasize her race during her campaigns, but she acknowledged the significance of her election after her 2014 victory. She said her win defied naysayers who suggested a Black, Republican, Mormon woman could not win a congressional seat in overwhelmingly white Utah.On Sunday evening, state leaders and members of the public visited the Utah capitol to pay their respects at Love’s flag-covered coffin behind ropes in the building’s rotunda.Love, born Ludmya Bourdeau, was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2022 and said her doctors estimated she had only 10 to 15 months to live, which she surpassed. With aggressive treatments, Love lived for nearly three years after receiving her diagnosis.Her close friend, Utah’s lieutenant governor, Deidre Henderson, told the audience on Monday that Love had asked her friends and family to rally around her like a campaign team when she was diagnosed.“‘I’m in fight mode,’ she told us, ‘and what I need from you all, more than anything, is to help me fight it. This is a campaign, and we are going to win,’” Henderson recalled.Love entered politics in 2003 after winning a city council seat in Saratoga Springs, 30 miles (48km) south of Salt Lake City. She was elected as the city’s mayor in 2009, becoming the first Black woman to serve as a mayor in Utah.In 2012, after giving a rousing speech at the Republican national convention, she narrowly lost a bid for the US House against the Democratic incumbent. She ran again two years later and won. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      Why the Right Still Embraces Ivermectin

      by

      Five years after the pandemic began, interest in the anti-parasitic drug is rising again as right-wing influencers promote it — and spread misinformation about it.Joe Grinsteiner is a gregarious online personality who touts the anti-parasitic drug ivermectin. In a recent Facebook video, he produced a tube of veterinary-grade ivermectin paste — the kind made for deworming horses.He gave the tube a squeeze. Then he licked a slug of the stuff, and gulped.“Yum,” Mr. Grinsteiner said in the Feb. 25 video, one of a number of ivermectin-related posts he has made that have drawn millions of views on Facebook this year. “Actually, that tastes like dead cancer.”Ivermectin, a drug proven to treat certain parasitic diseases, exploded in popularity during the pandemic amid false claims that it could treat or prevent Covid-19. Now — despite a persistent message from federal health officials that its medical benefits are limited — interest in ivermectin is rising again, particularly among American conservatives who are seeing it promoted by right-wing influencers.Mr. Grinsteiner, 54, is a Trump supporter and country music performer who lives in rural Michigan. He has claimed in his videos that ivermectin cured his skin cancer, as well as his wife’s cervical cancer. In a video last month, he said a woman told him her nonverbal autistic child had become verbal after using ivermectin. In a recent phone interview, Mr. Grinsteiner said that he takes a daily dose of ivermectin to maintain his general well-being.There is no evidence to support people taking ivermectin to treat cancer or autism. Yet Mr. Grinsteiner believes that the medical and political establishments just want to keep average people from discovering the healing powers of a relatively affordable drug. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      What Ivermectin Can (and Can’t) Do

      by

      Social media posts have promoted the anti-parasitic drug for cancer and Covid. That has doctors alarmed.At least once a week, someone asks Dr. Skyler Johnson if ivermectin can treat their cancer.Patients have asked about the anti-parasitic drug for years, especially during the pandemic. But in recent months, Dr. Johnson, a radiation oncologist at the University of Utah Huntsman Cancer Institute, has fielded more and more questions about the medication.Exaggerated and inaccurate comments about ivermectin have intensified online lately. Google searches for “ivermectin” hit their highest point in January since a Covid wave in 2022. That month, the actor Mel Gibson appeared on the hit podcast “The Joe Rogan Experience” and said that three friends with Stage 4 cancer recovered after taking ivermectin, among other drugs. Researchers said the podcast, which received 10 million views on YouTube alone, fed into a flood of inaccurate claims and misinformation about the drug’s purported health benefits.At the same time, politicians in several states are promoting legislation that would make it easier for people to obtain ivermectin. The governor of Arkansas signed a bill last week that would enable people to buy it without a prescription. Lawmakers in Georgia, Texas, West Virginia, Alabama, Louisiana and Kentucky have filed, or said they plan to file, similar legislation. A wealth of research has shown the drug does not treat Covid. And there is not evidence to support people taking ivermectin to treat cancer.“I understand that people, a lot of times, want to take health into their own hands — they want to figure things out on their own,” said Krissy Lunz Trujillo, an assistant professor of political science at the University of South Carolina who researches health misinformation. “But that might have really serious consequences.”Dr. Johnson worries that people will forgo traditional cancer treatments for a drug that hasn’t been proven to work. He tells patients that there is no rigorous research showing the anti-parasitic drug cures cancer in humans. Still, he has seen some people with early, treatable tumors turn to the drug, and return months later with cancers that have spread to their lymph nodes, bones and brain.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Administration Said to Drop Lawsuit Over Toxic Chemical

      by

      The Trump administration plans to drop a federal lawsuit against a chemical manufacturer accused of releasing high levels of a likely carcinogen from its Louisiana plant, according to two people familiar with the plans.The government filed the lawsuit during the Biden administration after regulators determined that chloroprene emissions from the Denka Performance Elastomer plant were contributing to health concerns in an area with the highest cancer risk of any place in the United States.The 2023 lawsuit was among several enforcement actions taken by the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of poor and minority communities that have disproportionately borne the brunt of toxic pollution.The Denka plant is located in the predominantly Black community of LaPlace, La., in a region so dense with industrial facilities that it is known as “Cancer Alley.” Chloroprene is used to produce neoprene, a synthetic rubber that is found in automotive parts, hoses, beer cozies, orthopedic braces and electric cables.The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. The agency intends to ask the United States District Court Eastern District of Louisiana this week to dismiss the lawsuit, according to the two people familiar with the decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the case.The lawsuit had given the neighboring community a measure of hope that pollution levels might finally come down, said Robert Taylor, a founder of Concerned Citizens of St John Parish, a community group.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in US Politics

      The greatest scandal is individual power | Brief letters

      by

      Scandalous as Donald Trump’s actions may be, they do not constitute the greatest scandal (Trump’s foreign aid cuts could be ‘big strategic mistake’, says Lammy, 7 February). That lies rather in the fact that a system purporting to display democracy to the world allows so much power to be concentrated in one individual’s hands. The eventual departure of the individual person will do nothing to rectify that colossal democratic deficit.Keith GrahamEmeritus professor of social and political philosophy, Bristol “Robert works hard, not always with success”, a Cardiff secondary school teacher once wrote on my report (Letters, 6 February). Another noted that my essays “would be improved with the inclusion of facts”. Fair play.Rob SkinnerChalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire Isn’t hiding train departure times minutes before scheduled departure (‘So patronising’: rail bosses spark anger by hiding train departure times, 6 February) to avoid platform rushes rather like removing the last carriage to avoid casualties in rear-end collisions?Prof Alan AlexanderEdinburgh Re the assertion the Elon Musk put a chip in a man’s brain (Elon Musk put a chip in this paralysed man’s brain. Now he can move things with his mind. Should we be amazed – or terrified?, 8 February), did he also put the engine in my neighbour’s Tesla? Please don’t exaggerate his superhero credentials.Caroline Newland-SmithStewkley, Buckinghamshire Yes, the PSA test probably does promote stress and anxiety (Letters, 5 February). But so does prostate cancer.Greg Shurgold(Radical prostatectomy 2017), Oxford More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      How Wildfire Smoke Threatens Human Health

      by

      The mucus and hairs in your nose can trap larger particles, and the mucus and cilia in your upper airway can catch some as well, said Luke Montrose, an environmental toxicologist at Colorado State University. But some PM2.5 or smaller particles can bypass these defenses and penetrate the deepest parts of your lungs. Dr. Montrose […] More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Tim Walz and the Pull of Rural America

      by

      More from our inbox:A Rattled Donald TrumpCancer Screenings Save Lives and Are Worth the CostFrom Rust to Rescue HeroAn Olympic Transit Reality Check Abbie Parr/Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Democrats Have Needed Someone Like Walz for Decades,” by Sarah Smarsh (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 9):Thank you for publishing Ms. Smarsh’s article, which so eloquently and succinctly illustrates how politicians, pundits and journalists have marginalized rural America by lumping us into a single category: red state.I am from a long line of early Indiana settlers: hard-working people who began as farmers and maintained honest lives while supporting democratic ideals and the Democratic Party. Reading this piece is a breath of fresh air, and I appreciate that Ms. Smarsh shares our appreciation for the honesty and direct communication of a fine person like Tim Walz. Thank you, Minnesota.Diana WannLebanon, Ind.To the Editor:Having grown up in a small town in Minnesota, I agree with Sarah Smarsh that Gov. Tim Walz brings back some essential elements into our politics.I am only a few generations removed from Norwegian immigrants who came to America and helped settle an area near the South Dakota border in the last decades of the 19th century.The effort to tame and harvest the prairie created a very pragmatic “let’s get it done and move on to other things” philosophy. Many of the older farmers I remember would describe today’s political rhetoric as “bells and whistles, but no engine.”Mr. Walz is not only a refreshing relief from much of the mindless political rhetoric we have to listen to today. He may very well also be putting the engine back on our national economy.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More