'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says

This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Avastin (bevacizumab) Approved By FDA For Treatment Of Aggressive Brain Cancer

The FDA (Food and Drug Administration, USA) approved Avastin (bevacizumab) for patients with GBM (glioblastoma multiforme) whose cancer carries on progressing after standard therapy. GBM is a rapidly progressing cancer - it invades brain tissue and can may have a significant effect on a patient´s mental abilities and physical activities. Approximately 6,700 people each year in the USA are affected by GBM.

Unfortunately, the cancer nearly always comes back, even when treated with surgery, radiation and/or chemotherapy.

Richard Pazdur, M.D., director of the Office of Oncology Drug Products in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said "This type of cancer is very resistant to therapy and thus challenging to treat. Avastin provides a therapy for patients with progressive GBM who have not responded to other medications."

Avastin is a monoclonal antibody that is produced in the laboratory. It mimics the antibodies our immune system produces to combat harmful substances. Avastin reduces the action of vascular endothelial growth factor that helps in the development of new blood vessels which can nourish a tumor and help it grow. The new blood vessels may also become a pathway for the cancer cells to spread around the body.

Avastin was first approved in 2004 by the FDA for the treatment of metastatic cancer of the colon or rectum. It has subsequently been approved to treat non-squamous, non-small cell lung cancer and metastatic breast cancer.

Two clinical trials showed that approximately one quarter of all patients with GBM responded to Avastin with an average duration of response of about 4 months.

Avastin´s most serious side effects include, gastrointestinal perforation, wound healing complications, hemorrhage, and blood clots - some of these side effects can be fatal. Other side effects include severe hypertension (high blood pressure), nervous system and vision disturbances, lower white blood cell counts, infection, myocardial infarction, stroke, and kidney problems. Common side effects include nosebleeds, hypertension, runny nose, headache, excess urine protein, alteration of taste, rectal bleeding, excessive tearing, dry skin, and skin peeling.

Genes Hike Melanoma Risk Even in Those Who Tan Well

TUESDAY, April 21 (HealthDay News) -- If you have dark eyes, dark hair and tan easily, you might think you don't have to worry much about melanoma.

But new research shows that variations of a particular gene can raise the risk of this deadly skin cancer, even in people whose ability to tan may make them appear to be at low risk. Having a variant of the melanocortin-1 receptor gene (MCIR) puts people who have dark hair, dark eyes and who tan easily at more than twice the risk of getting melanoma as those with similar complexions who don't have the variant.

"Traditionally, a clinician might look at a person with dark hair who did not sunburn easily and classify them as lower risk for melanoma, but that may not be true for all people in the population," said Peter Kanetsky, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a co-author of research on the topic. "Just because you tolerate sun exposure fairly well doesn't mean that you're not at increased risk for melanoma."

The findings were to be presented Tuesday at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in Denver.The researchers examined 779 people with melanoma at the Pigmented Lesion Clinic at the University of Pennsylvania and 325 people who did not have melanoma. They analyzed the participants' MCIR variant status and had them fill out questionnaires about sun exposure, ability to tan and their physical appearance.

Previous research has identified more than 50 versions of the MCIR gene, about four of which have been linked to an increased risk for melanoma, Kanetsky said. In the study, about 70 percent of the healthy participants had some variant of the gene, and nearly 27 percent had one of the four high-risk variants. Among the participants with melanoma, about 78 percent had a gene variant and 43 percent had a high-risk variant.

Those who had dark eyes and an MCIR variant had a about a threefold greater risk of developing melanoma than did those with dark eyes but no variant. Those who did not freckle but who had the high-risk variant had an eightfold increased risk, and those who tanned moderately or deeply after repeated sun exposure had about twice the risk. "They're finding that in people who are able to tan, who conceivably could have been educated not to worry about the sun, the presence of those variants does confer increased risk of developing melanoma, compared to those who do not have the MCIR variant," said Dr. David Fisher, chief of dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital and a dermatology professor at Harvard Medical School.

Having a variation of the MCIR gene has been shown in prior research to be associated with having red hair, freckles and fair skin. It's also been associated with a higher risk of melanoma, even when adjusting for lighter skin tone, lighter hair and lighter eyes, Kanetsky said.

In this study, the MCIR variant in people with red or blond hair did not affect melanoma rates. Researchers are not sure why the MCIR variant didn't seem to boost melanoma risk in the fair-haired group, but they suspect that other biological processes or genes could be at work, causing the increased melanoma risk. Melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, is highly curable when caught early. In 2008, an estimated 8,420 people in the United States died from it, according to the American Cancer Society. There were about 62,000 new cases.

Currently, there is no commercially available test for MCIR variants.

In Cancer, a Deeper Faith

By Dana Jennings

We are about to enter a holy few days for Jews and Christians. Passover starts at sundown tomorrow, and Easter is Sunday. But then again, when you’re a cancer patient, each day is a holy day – no matter what your beliefs.

I converted to Judaism five years ago, after decades spent stumbling toward God. That faith has helped sustain me this past year, from the diagnosis of my prostate cancer, through surgery, and through radiation and hormone treatment when it was learned that I had an aggressive cancer.

I am not a fool. I am a patient with Stage T3B cancer and a Gleason score of 9. I need the skills and the insights of the nurses and doctors who care for me. But they don’t treat the whole man. Medicine cares about physical outcomes, not the soul. I also need — even crave — the spiritual antibodies of prayer, song and sacred study.

And it’s a powerful thing to know that others are praying for your return to health. My faith reminds me that I am not alone, that I am part of a larger whole, part of an ancient tradition and a timeless narrative. Disease often makes us feel cut off from community, even from ourselves, and faith helps defy that sense of isolation.

One of our cultural verities about serious illness is that it often challenges our faith. But for me, if anything, having cancer has only deepened it, heightened it.

I have spent the past year in the dark ark of cancer, and there is no question that I have become a new man. I’ve been granted a wisdom that only arrives at the rugged confluence of middle age and mortality. And I know, soul deep, that I have not been cut open, radiated, and tried physically and spiritually so that I can merely survive, become a cancer wraith. Since my diagnosis — after shaking off the initial shock — I have kept asking myself, in the context of my belief: What can this cancer teach me?

The most surprising thing I’ve learned is that cancer can be turned toward blessing. Through the simple fact of me telling my cancer stories on this blog, many of you readers, in turn, have told your own stories. And that mutual sharing of our tales has changed my life for the good. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Life is not meaningful … unless it is serving an end beyond itself, unless it is of value to someone else.”

None of us would choose to have cancer. But getting this unexpected mortality check has deepened my appreciation of and connection to this life. Each moment holds out the promise of revelation.

Cancer, like faith, urges us toward the essential in our lives, toward love and kindness and paying attention to the smallest, smallest detail. We suddenly understand that ice chips spooned into a parched mouth, that being able to simply urinate, are gifts, the kinds of ordinary gifts that make up our lives.

So, yes, Easter and Passover beckon with their vernal tales of exile, renewal and redemption. I found out exactly one year ago today that I had prostate cancer. But I won’t know for a very long time whether I’ve been truly passed over.

Whatever happens, though, I’m ready.

Can a High-Fat Diet Beat Cancer?

The women's hospital at the University of Würzburg used to be the biggest of its kind in Germany. Its former size is part of the historical burden it carries — countless women were involuntarily sterilized here when it stood in the geographical center of Nazi Germany.

Today, the capacity of the historical building overlooking the college town, where the baroque and mid-20th-century concrete stand in a jarring mix, has been downsized considerably. And the experiments within its walls are of a very different nature.

Since early 2007, Dr. Melanie Schmidt and biologist Ulrike Kämmerer, both at the Würzburg hospital, have been enrolling cancer patients in a Phase I clinical study of a most unexpected medication: fat. Their trial puts patients on a so-called ketogenic diet, which eliminates almost all carbohydrates, including sugar, and provides energy only from high-quality plant oils, such as hempseed and linseed oil, and protein from soy and animal products.

What sounds like yet another version of the Atkins craze is actually based on scientific evidence that dates back more than 80 years. In 1924, the German Nobel laureate Otto Warburg first published his observations of a common feature he saw in fast-growing tumors: unlike healthy cells, which generate energy by metabolizing sugar in their mitochondria, cancer cells appeared to fuel themselves exclusively through glycolysis, a less-efficient means of creating energy through the fermentation of sugar in the cytoplasm. Warburg believed that this metabolic switch was the primary cause of cancer, a theory that he strove, unsuccessfully, to establish until his death in 1970.

To the two researchers in Würzburg, the theoretical debate about what is now known as the Warburg effect — whether it is the primary cause of cancer or a mere metabolic side effect — is irrelevant. What they believe is that it can be therapeutically exploited. The theory is simple: If most aggressive cancers rely on the fermentation of sugar for growing and dividing, then take away the sugar and they should stop spreading. Meanwhile, normal body and brain cells should be able to handle the sugar starvation; they can switch to generating energy from fatty molecules called ketone bodies — the body's main source of energy on a fat-rich diet — an ability that some or most fast-growing and invasive cancers seem to lack.

The Würzburg trial, funded by the Otzberg, Germany–based diet food company Tavartis, which supplies the researchers with food packages, is still in its early, difficult stages. "One big problem we have," says Schmidt, sitting uncomfortably on a small, wooden chair in the crammed tea kitchen of Kämmerer's lab, "is that we are only allowed to enroll patients who have completely run out of all other therapeutic options." That means that most people in the study are faring very badly to begin with. All have exhausted traditional treatments, such as surgery, radiation and chemo, and even some alternative ones like hyperthermia and autohemotherapy. Patients in the study have pancreatic tumors and aggressive brain tumors called glioblastomas, among other cancers; participants are recruited primarily because their tumors show high glucose metabolism in PET scans.

Four of the patients were so ill, they died within the first week of the study. Others, says Schmidt, dropped out because they found it hard to stick to the no-sweets diet: "We didn't expect this to be such a big problem, but a considerable number of patients left the study because they were unable or unwilling to renounce soft drinks, chocolate and so on."

The good news is that for five patients who were able to endure three months of carb-free eating, the results were positive: the patients stayed alive, their physical condition stabilized or improved and their tumors slowed or stopped growing, or shrunk. These early findings have elicited "very positive reactions and an increased interest from colleagues," Kämmerer says, while cautioning that the results are preliminary and that the study was not designed to test efficacy, but to identify side effects and determine the safety of the diet-based approach. So far, it's impossible to predict whether it will really work. It is already evident that it doesn't always: two patients recently left the study because their tumors kept growing, even though they stuck to the diet.

Past studies, however, offer some hope. The first human experiments with the ketogenic diet were conducted in two children with brain cancer by Case Western Reserve oncologist Linda Nebeling, now with the National Cancer Institute. Both children responded well to the high-fat diet. When Nebeling last got in contact with the patients' parents in 2005, a decade after her study, one of the subjects was still alive and still on a high-fat diet. It would be scientifically unsound to draw general conclusions from her study, says Nebeling, but some experts, such as Boston College's Thomas Seyfried, say it's still a remarkable achievement. Seyfried has long called for clinical trials of low-carb, high-fat diets against cancer, and has been trying to push research in the field with animal studies: His results suggest that mice survive cancers, including brain cancer, much longer when put on high-fat diets, even longer when the diets are also calorie-restricted. "Clinical studies are highly warranted," he says, attributing the lack of human studies to the medical establishment, which he feels is single-minded in its approach to treatment, and opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, which doesn't stand to profit much from a dietetic treatment for cancer.

The tide appears to be shifting. A study similar to the trial in Würzburg is now under way in Amsterdam, and another, slated to begin in mid-October, is currently awaiting final approval by the ethics committee at the University Hospital in Tübingen, Germany. There, in the renowned old research institution in the German southwest, neuro-oncologist Dr. Johannes Rieger wants to enroll patients with glioblastoma and astrocytoma, aggressive brain cancers for which there are hardly any sustainable therapies. Cell culture and animal experiments suggest that these tumors should respond particularly well to low-carb, high-fat diets. And, usually, these patients are physically sound, since the cancer affects only the brain. "We hope, and we have reason to believe, that it will work," says Rieger.

Still, none of the researchers currently studying ketogenic diets, including Rieger, expects it to deliver anything close to a universal treatment for cancer. And none of them wants to create exaggerated hopes for a miracle cure in seriously ill patients, who may never benefit from the approach. But the recent findings are difficult to ignore. Robert Weinberg, a biology professor at MIT's Whitehead Institute who discovered the first human oncogene, has long been critical of therapeutic approaches based on the Warburg effect, and has certainly dismissed it as a primary cause of cancer. Nevertheless, he conceded, in an email, for tumors that have been affected by the ketogenic diet in animal models, "there might be some reason to go ahead with a Phase I clinical trial, especially for patients who have no other realistic therapeutic options."

Richard Friebe is executive editor of the German science magazine SZ Wissen

Why Cancer Strikes Some

It's a conundrum that puzzles doctors and patients alike: one person smokes a few cigarettes per week in college and contracts lung cancer in middle age, while another person smokes a pack a day his whole life -- and lives to age 90.

A new program announced last week by the National Institutes of Health aims to unravel such mysteries by precisely measuring the role that environmental agents, such as pesticides and solvents, play in common diseases, including cancer, asthma, and autism.

A major part of the program will fund the development of technologies to monitor personal environmental exposures and to determine how those exposures interact with an individual's genetic makeup to increase the risk for disease. Scientists hope these technologies will allow doctors to determine who is at risk early on, and thus be able to intervene soon enough to prevent serious damage.

The NIH has designated $88 million for the period 2007-10 to fund research both inside and outside the institute. The money will go toward development of wearable sensors that measure exposure to environmental toxins, such as solvents, pesticides, and heavy metals.

The funds will also support the development of sensors to determine if exposure to toxins triggers biochemical pathways linked to disease, such as inflammation or cell death, in some individuals. Ultimately, these technologies will be incorporated into genetic studies to understand the link between genes, the environment, and disease.

Initially, the sensors would be used in population studies of disease. But David Schwartz, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (part of the NIH), envisions a day when everyone would wear a sensor that measured levels of key chemicals. An individual's doctor could then read the information and determine if the patient had been exposed to chemicals and therefore was at risk of developing a disease.

The role of environmental toxins in human disease and death has been a major issue in both the public health and legal arenas. Scientists often have difficulty determining if a reported increase in disease, such as a cancer cluster, is linked to a specific factor in the environment. Emerging technologies that could accurately measure exposure and individual response to different chemicals could clarify these often contentious cases.

New technologies could also help scientists understand some medical mysteries of our time -- such as rising asthma rates, which have doubled in the last two decades. Since the publication of the human genome sequence in 2003, scientists have focused enormous amounts of energy on the genetic basis of disease. "But genes don't tell the whole story," says Schwartz. "The recent increases in asthma, diabetes, and autism are not due to changes in our genome over last couple of decades. These major shifts point to the role our diet, activity levels, and environment play in disease."

"Scientists can now precisely measure genetic variation between individuals, but we can't accurately measure the individual variation in exposure or response to exposure...when faced with environmental challenges," Schwartz says. The new program hopes to fill that gap.

This timely program will take advantage of the explosion of information about the genome sequence, says Gerald N. Wogan, professor of chemistry and biological engineering at MIT. For example, scientists already know that people carry different forms of enzymes that detoxify chemicals, and that specific variants increase the risk of bladder cancer. But these new tools would allow scientists to do this kind of research on a much broader scale, he says.

Esteban González Burchard, a scientist at the University of California, San Francisco, believes that these kinds of tools will also help researchers understand complex diseases, such as asthma. His team, for instance, has shown that people with a particular genetic background are more likely to develop asthma when exposed to secondhand smoke. But the environmental contribution to asthma is probably even more complex, he says, with factors such as socioeconomic status also playing a role. And new technologies could help scientists sort out these complex factors.

Educate Yourself To Fight Against Mesothelioma

The use of asbestos had gained a new momentum in the twentieth century. You can speculate the wide range use of asbestos throughout the world just from the figure that states the amount of asbestos only used in the United States. The amount touches up to 30 million tons that have been used in different industrial sectors. It mainly comprises of the shipyards, construction of buildings, houses, hospitals and schools. The figure also gives an account of the rising numbers of victims suffering from the Mesothelioma cancer every year that have now reached 10000 and most of them are actually the workers in these industrial sectors those who have come in direct contact with the deadly mineral asbestos.

In the earlier times a misconception prevailed relating to this disease. Smoking cigarettes was considered to be the main cause but now there is no doubt in the fact that no other thing but asbestos can only damage the Mesothelium tissues in the body.

Things everyone must know about Mesothelioma:

* Asbestos is the main reason of Mesothelioma attack in the body.

* Asbestos fibers and dust enter the body through different channels but mainly through the air you breathe in.

* Asbestos fibers can readily mix with the atmosphere and form airborne particles and they strike directly on the Mesothelium lining protecting different internal organs in your body.

* The major organs that are at risk due to the Mesothelioma cancer are the heart, lungs, and abdominal cavity.

* Mesothelioma can happen in a person's body long after he has been in contact with the asbestos particles. The time limit ranges from 10-30 years.

* Life after the diagnosis is really short because Mesothelioma is mostly detected when the patient has already reached the final stage.

* The treatments that can help the patient to extend the life span are chemotherapy; radiation therapy and surgery but none of these traditional modes of treating cancer can give the ultimate solution to the patient.

* There are a few modern treatments devised with latest developments are helping the Mesothelioma patients to stay well. Among them the immunotherapy and the gene therapy have gained wide popularity.

* Mesothelioma can be fought for legal claims as well. So you must be aware of the legal prospects that can at least help you with a justified financial support to continue with the medical treatment and also a help for your family if you die. Mesothelioma attorneys are working to serve you for your benefits. Get help from them.