There is a school of thought which states that the Daily Mail is engaged in an ongoing project to classify every inanimate object into those which cause cancer, and those that prevent cancer.
Perhaps not quite as daft as Facebook increasing your risk of cancer (!), apparently turning on a light when you wake up to relieve yourself in the night can cause it...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1265277/Cancer-dan...
Simply turning on a light at night for a few seconds to go to the toilet can cause changes that might lead to cancer, scientists claim.
Researchers in the UK and Israel found that when a light is turned on at night, it triggers an 'over-expression' of cells linked to the formation of cancer.
According to this site, the Wail has implicated (amongst others) almunium, bras, cordless phones, deodorant, flip flops, height, IVF, left-handedness, being male, oral sex, pastry, shaving, talcum powder, and even work.
There's also The (New) Daily Mail Oncological Ontology Project, which does a similar thing but in blog format.
Comments
Bad Science
This is also the claim by one of my favourite Guardian columnists Dr Ben Goldacre. In fact he may be the guy who started it. Amongst his other targets are the MMR scare and homoeopathy. Well worth reading.
He can be found here: http://www.badscience.net/
Robi
Forget me not
There's also a bit of news today about research on how diet might help to prevent Alzheimer's disease.
Diet wards of Alzheimer's
Preventing Senility
Bike Archive
Bike Resources
There is probably
some research somewhere that suggests reading crap newspapers causes stupidity. The daily wail, along with the other tabloids tends to misquote and misconstrue items from research papers and to draw simplistic conclusions from complex concepts in order to have a catchy headline.
It's possible, that apart from their readers being less than critical, they are interested in reading about anti-cancer treatments and anti-ageing, because most of them are over fifty and in the 'at-risk' groups. The fact that the stories are pure bilge and not recognised as such, is very sad.
Angharad
Angharad
3-HEADED ELVIS BABY FOUND ON MARS!
For pure idiocy the Daily Mail doesn't even come close to "the world's newspaper", The Weekly World News. It's put out by a pack of reprobate drunks down in Rat's Mouth, Florida and doesn't even try to offer news, they just make stuff up. I think most of its subscribers can figure out that it's a spoof of trashy tabloids, but sometimes I wake up screaming in the dead of night at the thought that there's probably a number of people who think it's the real deal (like pro-wrestling fans, and those who send hate mail to characters on soap operas), and then go vote based on what they read in it.
~~hugs, Laika
What borders on pure insanity?
Canada and Mexico.
.