Well done Sweden

They are indeed an invention of the Infernal One. :slight_smile:

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OH loves them, eats them like sweeties, so I have to grow masses of them every year :pleading_face:

I agree, I think I that the Americans are more dangerous than the Chinese.

No, you are not. I was told that hair dye passes into your blood stream.

How can people not be intolerant of pesticides etc.?

Pesticides may be designed to target very specific metabolic pathways that are not present in mammals, for example pathways affecting the growth of a chitin exoskeleton. Antibiotics work like this, targeting mechanisms that are specific to the bacteria. My first real lab job was running a drug screen looking for a compound that would eliminate an intracellular parasite which caused East Coast Fever in cattle. The compound selected in the end was very specific to the parasite and would not harm the cows.

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A tiny amount might, depending on what it was and the dose. There’s a chemical (ppd) which apparently causes allergic reactions in some people, but generally they will be cleared quickly.

Do you have a link for your source?

Danger is everywhere !

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“$12,500”

Not enough. $1.25b would be more appropriate.

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You know, I’ve been puzzling over the apparent epidemic in prostate cancer in men, I feel sure it"s environmentally caused not genetic, and I wonder if this could be a prime cause.

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There are various ways of seasoning / culotter pans. With a good pan which method you choose matters less.

Personally I used to season cast iron pans with the heat a little oil and salt till salt is literally red hot, etc, and do it twice. But many of my pans I never seasoned at all, just using them regularly was enough.

Enamel can benefit from a light coating of oil but older enamel didn’t need that.

I won’t have aluminium pans in the house, think I started getting rid about 40 years ago. Though I may have the odd cake tin lurking …

I couldn’t possibly comment. But I do have a half hectare where I have let many bushes grow.

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I suspect much of it is progress in diagnostic techniques and longer lifespans. Before, it either killed you or something else killed you first.

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Yes, I think most men who reach their seventies and eighties have a “touch” of it. But at that age it’s growing slowly and the likelihood is something else will get you first.

We’ve really no cancer in our family. So I thought it was a toss up as to whether it’s my dodgy ticker or my dodgy lungs that would do me in. Though the little cancerous growth in my right upper lung that was removed successfully and totally last year did give pause for thought. It’s all a bit of a lottery, isn’t it?

Feminizing hormones are often used to treat prostate cancer, slowing the growth. While I wouldn’t completely rule out a link, it’s not one I’ve heard of.

My concern is more the effect they have on fertility, and possibly also sense of sex and gender. Fat tissue also produces oestrogen, and that can also affect fertility and psychology (as well as men growing breasts - gynaecomastia). Moobs are a thing.

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Not really, when there is a problem (after some considerable time often) then there are investigations, whilst scanning methods have improved quite recently it was just, in the case of prostate the same PSA and biopsy which really didn’t prove much unless they found a tumour cell in the sample. Back when I was selling insurance the stats given to us by the Insurance industry and which I still thought were “enhanced” to shock were 1:7 would get cancer, compare that to the Insurance industry and various cancer research data we are just above 1:2 thats not detection thats tragedy. Our bodies immune system is busy killing rogue cells all the time but I feel if you overload it, just like any health service it suffers. Then you have the tricky thing that even your bodies immune cells recognise a tumour as your own cells so leave ir alone and go off to fight some other thing you have ingested or absorbed.

That would be ignoring the much greater prevalence of PSA testing, modern MRI-guided biopsies so we’re no longer poking blindly and PSMA PET scans that find metastases much earlier.

Quite simply, we’re finding prostate cancer long before symptoms slow up which is a good thing because symptoms only appear when things are quite advanced.

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1:7 would get cancer or be killed by it? That feels very low for incidence.

You’ve sent me down a rabbit hole. This paper suggests that the lifetime incidence rate for a man born in the 30s is was around 46%, rising to just under 50% for someone born in the 60s and they go on to infer that the biggest driver is increased life expectancy. It’s quite an interesting read.

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It definitely is.

Both my brothers and I (aged 69, 65 and 59 - I am the eldest) recently got tested for a blood marker called LP(a) that shows the genetic propensity for coronary artery disease, after my middle brother Andy’s doctor flagged it up as potential problem for all of us, having found that Andy had a build up of calcium in his arteries, despite being very fit (he does Ironman competitions!).

Our father had two heart attacks and various heart operations, and died aged 78, so they got it from him but I didn’t it seems - my test came back negative but both Andy & Simon had high LP(a) levels.

No surgery needed for either of them thankfully, but Simon is also now having to lose weight rapidly and take pills to reduce his risk of a heart attack.

Oh and on prostate cancer - get tested gents! It’s a simple blood test, they don’t stick fingers in you any more…

That test is rubbish. PSE should replace it immediately. Two brothers one a very high PSA and loads 30+ biopsy result negative, his brother low to normal PSA readings has prostate cancer because the Useless PSA test kept reporting normal until it was diagnosed by other means.

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