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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24609 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Skin cancer kills almost no one.

AHEM.

Latest figures show that in 2014 as many as 1,041 people were diagnosed with melanoma in Ireland – the first time the number of incidences here surpassed the 1,000-mark since records began.

Cases of melanoma have almost trebled in the last 20 years. While cases have increased, thankfully so have survival rates; now, almost 9 in 10 (89.3%) of patients survive for at least five years after their diagnosis.

However, Ireland still has the highest mortality rate in Europe for melanoma, with, on average, 159 people dying from this disease annually.

And this is Ireland, not noted for "long hot sunny days year-round".

So basically 100 people in a country of 5m? 1 out of 50k isn’t that worrying. Moreover Irish are probably most susceptible to it.

Dying from something easily preventable is also a stupid way to go.

Why not advise kids to smoke tobacco, too? They probably won't get lung cancer, and the benefits of nicotine are that they won't get fat and will have better focus!

I had a close relative who died of lung cancer from smoking, so "only a few people relative to the entire population are gonna die" isn't a good sell to me. It's a fucking miserable, humiliating, degrading, painful, awful, horrible way to die and I can't think dying of skin cancer is any better.

You are now switching the argument. Is sunscreen stupid? No. Is dying from skin cancer common? No.

Dying from something easily preventable is also a stupid way to go.

Depends on whether the cost of that prevention would have been too high. It's easy to prevent death via recreational mountaineering -- don't do it -- but I think you'll find that to be a rather unpopular position among mountaineering enthusiasts. Similarly, it may be easy to stay inside when the sun is out, but the cost of doing so is high regardless.

Why not advise kids to smoke tobacco, too? They probably won't get lung cancer, and the benefits of nicotine are that they won't get fat and will have better focus!

It's a reasonable question to ask, but I think if you added up the pluses and minuses you'd find smoking is a negative on balance. Not just lung cancer but COPD and a host of other diseases which debilitate as well as kill, plus stinking like smoke and having cravings for cigarettes.

But maybe I'm wrong; my mother was a lifelong unrepentant smoker, though it did kill her in the end.

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