> Cancer has risen dramatically recently

Has it? All I can find is

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/cance...

and

http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html

The first says it's basically holding for everyone but the very old who weren't well represented 100 years ago, and the second seems to show a slight decline in the past ~20 or so years with a peak in 1975 and holding almost steady after that. Basically what you would expect with improved diagnosis.

Don't forget, at least in the 1st world, far fewer people die from infectious diseases and accidents than they used to, but they still die, so increases in cancer rates (if they exist) can be explained without there being any specific environmental or lifestyle causes.

Add to that list heart disease. I'm sure most people know someone that could have died from heart problems prior to cancer becoming the cause of death much later in life. Also medical advances that prevent complications and in some cases death from diabetes.

well, as general categories, cancer, heart and diabetes are the main non-accident reasons people die, for example in my country (US), and it's similar in most other countries. I see that trend as continuing (as a consequence of the nature of health care, and lifestyle).

The actual details underlying the health trajectories of individuals (and then viewed in aggregate) are interesting, and the way we record cause of death, study deaths, (and the studies are then reported on) don't really capture the finer details in most cases.

Is it definitely cancer that is rising dramatically, or is there possibly also our ability to become aware of cancer rising dramatically? Does new age media allow us to be aware of all things dramatically moreso than historically? It's a cheap retort to your statement on my part but I think valid enough to raise.

People now are less likely to die because of another reason, such as heart failure, and more likely to live long enough to die from cancer. That said, I would want to read the manuscript carefully before I accept its findings.

Do you have a source for this? Cancer incidence was steady in women and declined by 1.8% per year for men between 2007-2011. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8821931 Did it get more prevalent in the last few years?

Re the documentary: Interactions between human health and the human microbiome, especially the intestinal microbiome, are one of the hottest areas in the field of genomics right now, with recent publications suggesting a real and highly significant link between microbiome health and overall health; I don't have time at the moment to link references, but you should be able to find them pretty trivially via Google.

I believe overall cancer incidence rates have risen while cancer mortality rates have fallen.

Influencing factors could be improvements in the early detection of cancer and advancements in medicine for treating it.

Another possible cause is the almost global increase in exposure to non-ionizing radiation from the ubiquity of wireless devices. The International Agency for Research on Cancer have stated that non-ionizing radiation could cause cancer in humans. [1]

[1] http://www.iarc.fr/en/media-centre/pr/2011/pdfs/pr208_E.pdf

Maybe it's just being properly diagnosed more often. In the 1800s, it was just called "consumption."

Consumption was actually tuberculosis.

"Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB (short for tubercle bacillus), in the past also called phthisis, phthisis pulmonalis, or consumption, is a widespread, and in many cases fatal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis.[1]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis