• Question: how long will it take to cure cancer

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      Asked by 863merf39 to Waqar, Angus, Catherine, Jenni, Melissa on 15 Jun 2016. This question was also asked by Lily.Broom.
      • Photo: Waqar Ahmed

        Waqar Ahmed answered on 15 Jun 2016:

        Depends when someone clever enough will come along and cure all cancers. I think there are a lot of people working on this problem at the moment, and some cancers can be cured already.

      • Photo: Angus Cook

        Angus Cook answered on 16 Jun 2016:

        Good question, and to be honest I don’t know.

        Part of the problem is that ‘cancer’ can mean many different types of disease, which have different causes and different treatments. As Waqar says, some can be cured or treated already, and the treatments we have are getting better and more successful as we research more and more.

        Another issue is that we don’t just need to talk about treatment, but also prevention. I would guess (and I might be wrong) that more people have been saved from lung cancer because of bans on smoking, than because of direct medical treatment. As I say I might be wrong with the numbers, but it’s an important point to realise that changing people’s behaviour and lifestyle may be just as important as medical treatments.

      • Photo: Melissa Ladyman

        Melissa Ladyman answered on 16 Jun 2016:

        Like Angus said ‘cancer’ is really just one name for many different diseases. In the most basic sense cancer just means that the cells in your body are not told that they should stop growing so they keep going and make lumps. There are hundreds of different ways in which the body can get mixed signals and not tell the cells to stop. It is really difficult to find one way to cure all cancers because they can be caused by so many different things, and we don’t really know all the causes yet.

        The good thing is that the cancer treatments now are so much better than they were 10 years ago, and they get better every year. There are lots of scientists trying to fit all the puzzle pieces together- some work on how we can prevent cancer, some work on what causes cancer, some work on how to find cancer in people’s bodies, and some work on making new medicines. Cancer treatments are getting better all of the time, but it is likely to be quite a long time before we can cure every single person.

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