Othelo wrote:The smoking thing & cancer really puzzles me. How cone when i was growing up there were wazee smoking heavily and snorting tobacco but cancer was not such a menace. Again my village grows tobacco and the leaf 'burning - preparation' process is not for the faint hearted yet cancer has not been that serious among the rural folks. It is the urban guys and women (breast and cervix) with high numbers.
There's the small matter of accurate diagnosis. As a young kid, I was told the story of a distant relative who died of what they at the time described as an unhealing wound. I did manage to somehow follow it up when I was older and my conclusion was she most likely had undiagnosed bone cancer.
There's a lot that science doesn't yet know about some of these ailments and new info comes from research almost daily. Thing with cancer is that it requires a somewhat complex interplay of both genetics and environmental factors. Short of massive genetic testing, it'd be difficult for one o know whether they are predisposed or not.
Not forgetting, no two people can ever be the same really. Some will smoke for life and die of old age, others will smoke for 10yrs and die of lung cancer, among others.
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.