Cancer Suspected to Be a Man Made Disease

The mummy was said to be an ordinary person, from the Ptolemaic period. Radiologists have also examined all the mummies at museums in Cairo and Europe and found no evidence of cancer at all. According to the researchers, the virtual absence of malignancies in mummies must be interpreted as indicating their rarity in antiquity, indicating that cancer-causing factors are limited to societies affected by modern industrialization.

Besides examining the mummified remains from ancient Egypt, the investigators also examined literary evidence from ancient Greece and Egypt, as well as carrying out medical examinations of animal and human remains further back in history, dating as far back as the cretaceous period, the age of dinosaurs. The results showed that according to animal and early human remains and fossil evidence, cancer was extremely uncommon. Virtually all evidence of tumors (which were extremely uncommon anyway) was benign, and the few malignancies that were found were in nonhuman primates, none of them cancers found in modern adult humans. Only one Edmontosaurus fossil of unknown primary origin had evidence of metastatic cancer.

Evidence of cancer and medical procedures for treating them does not appear until the 17th century, the researchers revealed. Scientific literature depicting distinctive tumors have only been present for the last 200 years, when data started to be documented about chimney sweeps with scrotal cancer in 1775, nasal cancer in snuff users in 1761, and Hodgkin's disease in 1832. The study was published in the October 2010 issue of Nature Reviews Cancer.

"In industrialized societies, cancer is second only to cardiovascular disease as a cause of death; but in ancient times, it was extremely rare,” said Prof. Rosalie David, Ph.D., of the center for biomedical Egyptology at the faculty of life sciences. "There is nothing in the natural environment that can cause cancer. So it has to be a man-made disease, down to pollution and changes to our diet and lifestyle.”

The researchers added that disease that appear at an older age such as atherosclerosis, Paget's disease, and osteoporosis did exist in ancient Greece and Egypt; in fact, those affected were old enough to develop common modern cancers. Moreover, if humans at that time lived long enough to develop those diseases, the extreme rarity of cancer cannot be put down to shorter life spans. In addition, there is no evidence of any childhood cancers in ancient Greece or Egypt, an increasingly more common condition today than it was in ancient Greece and Egypt.

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