Losing focus

I ran across a bit of an old article from Slate today. It discusses something that has occurred to me more as I am advancing in my epidemiology and population health studies. Specifically, the search for the one item or exposure that causes a cancer is overly simplistic and potentially harmful because it draws the focus away from the multifactorial nature of most cancers. Also emphasized is the push to sensationalize rare or weak causes of cancer (such as cell phones and brain cancer or Bisphenol-A and breast cancer). The point is not that these things are not possibly linked in some way to increasing relative risk (just to be clear, cell phones do not cause brain cancer), but that their contribution is relatively small, and by emphasizing these things, we lose focus on the bigger picture.

An example is the relatively low number of girls who are getting vaccinated for HPV, despite the clear, strong data linking infection as one of the most important causal entities for cervical and vulvar cancer. I like the author's description of this phenomenon as "worry candy" put out there by the media to incite fear. It seems like every night there is a news story about something else being linked to some cancer, and from night to night the stories may even contradict each other. Imagine as a patient how conflicting this must feel.