Exercise to keep cancer at bay : Nobel laureate - The Nation

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PRAVIT ROJANAPHRUK
THE NATION November 28, 2012 1:00 am

He said access to clean drinking water and exercise were important factors in reducing the risk of cancer.

Zur Hausen is currently in Bangkok as part of the "Bridges: Dialogues Towards a Culture of Peace" forum organised by the Vienna-based International Peace Foundation. The dialogue runs over several months.

Zur Hausen, who says he leads a very sedentary lifestyle and that his exercise consists of a game of chess, won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2008 for discovering that the human papillomavirus (HPV) causes cervical cancer, the second-most common cancer among women.

He also learned that tumour cells, if they contained an oncogenic virus, would harbour viral DNA integrated into their genomes.

A GLASS OF WINE IS HEALTHY

While many cancer-inducing carcinogens known to man are linked to cigarettes and alcohol, zur Hausen has said that drinking a glass of wine every now and then is fine, even healthy. Yet, finding the cause of cancer remains almost impossible.

"No cancer is due to a single factor," he told The Nation.

"Infected cells acquire changes and there's the extremely long latency period."

Zur Hausen, who hails from Germany and was formerly chairman and scientific director of the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), completes his membership at the National Science Transfer and Development Agency in Bangkok at the end of this year.

Joking that more old people were getting cancer because young people died in sports and motor-related accidents, zur Hausen predicted that cancer would remain with humanity for a "long period of time", though different types will be prevalent in different regions.

In Thailand, he said, people were particularly susceptible to a type of liver cancer called cholangeo carcinomia, while in Europe there's a higher rate of pancreatic cancer.

People in Africa, meanwhile, were susceptible to all types of cancer because they had greater exposure to carcinogenic substances.

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