Pre-cancers and liability to other diseases

Abstract

Data of 10,556 case-control pairs from the Oxford Survey of Childhood Cancers and related sources have shown that when cancers originate in the reticuloendothelial system (RES neoplasms) they are liable to cause loss of immunological competence before they are clinically recognizable. Since these early effects may have lethal consequences, the true prevalence of RES neoplasms is difficult to identify, especially in infection-sensitive age groups and populations with high death rates from infection. An inevitable consequence of a nuclear holocaust is a high infection death rate. Therefore, a population of A-bomb survivors is a totally unsuitable one for studying the precise nature of the association between ionizing radiation and human cancers.