Safer in the wild?

I may be obsessed with this subject of health and cancer, but i guess i have enough reason to be, as most of us do.

Just as there are plenty of things out there regarding food to treat and prevent cancer, there is a lot of information as to why so many of us may be getting cancer. This may, or may not be new information for some of you, but it is new to me, so i will share it. I believe that if we know the "why" and "how", it can help us elliminate cancer from our lives.

I was digging around to see if wild animals ever get cancer, and all i could find were wild animals getting cancer from human pollutants (some information that cancer in the wild is rare). I stumbled upon an article by Scientific American that may link colon cancer to alluminum. Here is the excerpt from that article:

"...Belugas in the St. Lawrence Estuary have drawn the most attention because of the estuary’s proximity to aluminum smelters. The smelters released 20 tons of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons into nearby waters every year. One of the substances, benzo(a)pyrene, which is classified as a probable human carcinogen, accounted for nearly a ton of the smelters’ yearly emissions.

The compounds accumulated in sediments and were absorbed by mussels and other invertebrates, which are the main food source of the one-ton whales. One study found that blue mussels transplanted into the estuary increased their benzo(a)pyrene levels 200-fold.

When Martineau and his group began analyzing beluga carcasses in the early 1980s, they noticed that many of the whales had intestinal tumors. Over the next 20 years, the group found cancer to be the major cause of death in adult belugas—a surprising finding given the rarity of the disease in wildlife.

In particular, small-intestinal tumors seemed to be especially prevalent and deadly for the animals: 27 percent had died of cancer, and 30 percent of the cancers were found in their small intestines. Colon cancer is common in humans and other animals, but small-intestinal cancers are relatively rare.

The 27 percent rate of cancer deaths for the estuary’s belugas is similar to the 23 percent rate for humans in the Western world, Martineau noted. McAloose called that similarity “very interesting … Similar diseases caused by similar circumstances often have similar outcomes.”

In 2004, two years after the beluga study was published, the aluminum smelters near the St. Lawrence estuary closed.

But, five years later, the belugas that first caught Martineau’s attention have not recovered. And he is not surprised.

“Cancer is the consequence of a lifetime of accumulating mutations,” said Martineau, who added that the deadly disease “is exactly what you would expect to find in animals that are eating from these sediments.”

The beluga population, he suspects, won’t begin to recover for at least half a lifetime – 35 years, in the case of these long-lived whales. Fewer than 1,000 belugas, which are listed as a threatened species in Canada, remain in the estuary.

Researchers like Martineau and McAloose continue to stress the importance of studying wildlife diseases driven by pollution. Developmental disorders and reproductive problems in animals may also be linked to industrial pollutants and other contaminants.

“Cancer may just be the easiest endpoint to get our hands on,” McAloose said. “We need to continue try to see connections between pollutants and disease, but currently there just aren’t a lot of people looking.”

This article originally ran at Environmental Health News, a news source published by Environmental Health Sciences, a nonprofit media company."

I'm going out on a limb here, but aren't most pots and pans made from aluminum?

Hugs,
Krista