Today’s interesting fact has to do with Cancer.

Cancer has been in the news lately.

It used to be said that one in four would develop cancer in their lifetime.

This has changed to one in three, now that people are living longer.

All men for example, if they live long enough, are thought to develop at least a benign form of cancer of the prostate, and as men are living longer, this skews the statistics.

One recent announcement has given many suffers hope, some researchers have modified the DNA of an Adenovirus so that it targets cancer cells and kills them, but healthy cells are left alone.

It has been suggested that the virus could target any cancer cell.

If this works correctly, then cancer could be a thing of the past.

If this virus mutates to target healthy cells when it is used in patients, it could kill the patients and create a pandemic.

It will be interesting to find out what happens.

Today’s interesting fact has to do with Medicine.

People get upset with their physicians for not being able to instantly diagnose their ailments.

Recent studies have suggested that physicians diagnose and perscribe the correct treatment only about 30% of the time, and this often means multiple visits before you get the correct treatement.

Often patients get better dispite their treatments.

One reason this occurs, is that many different ailments have the same symptoms and doctors need to rule out the most common illnesses before they try to cure the less common ones.

Still we are much better off than we were less than 100 years ago.

A recent historical documentry pointed out that the practice of medicine only stopped killing more patients than it cured in around 1920.

The percentage is much better now, but a quick search hasn't been able to find the actual percentage medicine still kills.