Untangling The Roots Of Cancer In Nigeria

UNTANGLING THE ROOTS OF CANCER IN NIGERIA

ABSTRACT

Tobacco smoke, most people would say. Probably too much alcohol, sunshine or grilled meat; infection with cervical papillomaviruses; asbestos. All have strong links to cancer, certainly. But they cannot be root causes. Much of the population is exposed to these carcinogens, yet only a tiny minority suffers dangerous tumors as a consequence.

A cause, by definition, leads invariably to its effect. The immediate cause of cancer must be some combination of insults and accidents that induces normal cells in a healthy human body to turn malignant, growing like weeds and sprouting in unnatural places.

At this level, the cause of cancer is not entirely a mystery. In fact, a decade ago many geneticists were confident that science was homing in on a final answer: cancer is the result of cumulative mutations that alter specific locations in a cell’s DNA and thus change the particular proteins encoded by cancer-related genes at those spots. The mutations affect two kinds of cancer genes. The first are called tumor suppressors. They normally restrain cells’ ability to divide, and mutations permanently disable the genes. The second variety, known as oncogenes, stimulate growth—in other words, cell division. Mutations lock oncogenes into an active state. Some researchers still take it as axiomatic that such growth-promoting changes to a small number of cancer genes are the initial event and root cause of every human cancer.

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