The Daily Mail's Cancer Fetish

After reading that Facebook causes cancer in the pages of that esteemed journal of fear, the Daily Mail, I decided to have a look through their archives for some other health advice. As Ben Goldacre has frequently observed, the Mail has taken upon themselves a task befitting some mythical inmate of Hades: to divide all inanimate objects into the categories of either causing or curing cancer.

By entering cancer into their website search box, I realised just how true that was. Below are a few things from the first few pages of results (bear in mind there were 200 pages of results just in the health section, i.e not including news of Jade Goody etc).

The following supposedly cause, or adversely affect, cancer:

Tibolone (menopause drug)
HRT
Green Tea
Smoking Cannabis
Soup
Mouthwash
The Contraceptive Pill
Wine
Caffeine
Beer and Wine
Talcum Powder
Stress
Being tall
Vitamin E
Wine again
Being Black
Wine again
Bacon, Ham, Sausages, Salt & Alcohol
Binge Drinking

The following are claimed to prevent, treat or cure cancer:

Walking
Sex
Measles
Tea
Fasting
Eating slowly
HRT
Asperin
Exercise (but only with at least 7 hours sleep)
Shark Blood
Red Wine
Circumcision
Walking again
Migraines
Salsa Dancing
Allergies
Red Wine
Red Wine again
Red Wine again
Herbal Tea
Beer
Chocolate

The really worrying thing is how many items are repeated in both lists. I don't know how Daily Mail readers ever bring themselves to leave their houses; it must be a scary world for them. Although, as we've read in the Facebook article, staying inside causes cancer. Especially if you have to eat anything except chocolate. So maybe outside is the safest place to be. Unless you're tall or black, of course, in which case there probably isn't any hope anyway.

Silly as all this is, there are serious consequences of this kind of over-extrapolated, unscientific sensationalism. First, people who buy into these stories will end up living their lives confused and scared, consciously avoiding many foods and activities that are perfectly harmless because they've read an ungrounded assertion in a newspaper that it will kill them.

Far more importantly than that, though, stories like this erode and undermine the public understanding of science. A constant stream of contradictory stories about whether wine is really good for you or not leads people to believe that scientists don't know what they're doing. The whole process of science is made to look like arbitrary guess work. It becomes obvious to wonder, if scientists can't make up their minds about wine, coundn't they be equally confused about vaccines or global warming? Once the perception of scientists and their work is thus reduced in the public mind, anybody's opinion, no matter how ill-founded, can be seen as just as valid as a scientific theory. Why shouldn't Jeni Barnett dislike MMR without knowing what's in it? Scientists probably don't know much more, right?