What I see is a conjunction of factors creating a perfect storm. If it was just the food, maybe, but it isn’t. Air, water, food, environment, the things you touch, you wear, you use like plates or glasses, they all have different kinds of carcedogenic materials. Look at the data. Look at teh little news we have.
yes, those those factors all have effects on our body and i believe that taiwan’s air, food, whatever is not the healthiest. this should be common sense. what i dont believe, is simply the topic of this thread that taiwan in fact has the highest death rate from cancer. i don’t believe that seeing what other (se asian) countries are doing industrial,medical and evinromental-wise. their cancer rate should be much higher.
What about eye cancer from looking at Taiwanese buildings and websites?
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Hopefully no ones has died from the awful aesthetics of TW buildings.
Haha.
Depends. Radiactive rebar anyone?
I believe the myriad of factors multiplied by so little space and so much population gives us those numbers.
Question: how much could these statistics simply be an artifact of people needing to die from something? OK, 28% of people in Taiwan die from cancer, 17% of people in China die from cancer, and 19% of people in Australia die from cancer. But hypothetically it’s possible that Taiwan has more people who are living long enough to get cancer. It could be that in Taiwan a higher percentage die from cancer because a lower percentage die from heart attacks, diabetes, etc.
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That’s probably part of it, but as Icon said these cancers are mostly affecting younger people, not people who might otherwise have died of heart attacks. Taiwanese people are not (globally) unusually long-lived.
The fact that it’s specific types of cancers contributing disproportionately to the overall high rate suggests to me that it’s one specific causative agent, or a couple of interacting factors. I doubt that it’s a general “unhealthy environment” (food, pollution, etc) since you would expect that to result in a much wider range of diseases.
There’s a lot you could do with the statistics. Somebody must have done it. Are these cases clustered around certain areas? Are the most common cancers increasing or decreasing, and how does that correlate with possible causative factors? Are there specific occupations involved? Etc etc.
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I usually just get styes from those things. It can be pretty painful though.
fixed it for ya
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Eh problem is lung cancer are mostly women who do not smoke but cook. Cooking in Taiwan is a cancer danger.
I would also bet driving a scooter is a factor.
Not to say that Long Life are anyting but. But I remember from previous years studies that they were not the majority.
While alcoholism plays a part in liver cancer, in Taiwan it is complications from hepatitis. Eat outside 3 time s aday is rolling the dice while playing Russian rulette and the odds are not in our favor.
yeah… I don’t know that many young women who cook… Granted I don’t know that many people to begin with, but most young women, even if they want to cook, don’t live in a place with a big enough kitchen to do it.
For young people, I think it’s a combination of bad (horrible!) diet, complete lack of exercise, high stress and just general malaise.
Believe it or not, Finno, this time I actually wasn’t going after you specifically. I was going after a claim that multiple people including journalists have been saying/liking lately. (Your post was just the most convenient to reply to because you linked to an article on that topic.)
To be clear: I’m not dumping on the entirety of TCM. I’ve been to TCM doctors myself and found them knowledgeable and helpful, often more so than the bag o’pills Western variants. That doesn’t mean that a-Huang isn’t going to pop into his friendly neighbourhood TCM pharmacy once a week to buy a brew for his embarrassing little problem off-prescription.
Right. Same problem with western medicine. The point being, if we say Chinese medicine causes cancer we should ponder what that actually means.
We could also say food causes cancer or breathing causes cancer and still be right. 
While “you reckon” that it might be the air or the food supply, the reality is that those things are not radically different to, say, American air and food.
Wait, what?
Taiwan uses the same pesticides, the same packaging, the same processing equipment, and often the same basic ingredients. The vehicles and emission standards are pretty much the same as everywhere else.
Now hold on. Taiwan is far more urbanized, so even if the motorcycle engines are the same (and I’m not sure about that), and even if motorcycle ownership and use are the same per capita (and that also seems doubtful), you would still get different results in hyper-dense Taiwan.
Pesticide use and so on, I don’t know. But the whole health/natural food trend seems to be a much more recent development in Taiwan, since they didn’t experience the whole hippie culture thing half a century ago. How many organic farms are there in the whole of Taiwan, I wonder?
You may well be right, but unless you can pinpoint some specific difference that you have positively associated with cancer, what exactly are you going to “clean up?”. It’s a genuine mystery. Taiwan has a legacy of a whole bunch of stuff copied from the West and has very few of the known problems (eg., smoky indoor cooking) associated with cancer in other parts of Asia.
I believe the links have already been found, which people have alluded to in earlier posts, and some good ideas (at least for the air) have been put forward in other threads. No profound mystery imho. 
My last visit just 3 weeks ago to follow up my Hypothyroid.
Went to NTU for blood test and ultrasound then the lady asked if possible for me to have quick biopsy which scares me, then I just said no problem.
While waiting for that needle heard the guy that two patient before me are having “C”
I was bit sad hearing about this anyway my result was now Hashimoto which I really need to change my food diet.
Except I didn’t say that, and I think you’ll find that even people who do say it don’t actually mean “all Chinese medicine causes cancer”. If there is one particular drug that causes cancer, and lots of people take that drug whenever they’ve got a cold or itchy toenails, then you’ve got a massive problem. It doesn’t matter in the slightest if 99.99% of Chinese medicine is useful and/or safe.
Well - would you like to pinpoint some specific differences?
Personally I thought LA was filthier by far than Taipei, at least as far as air quality goes. Americans have traditionally viewed pollution and environmental destruction as a sign of economic progress, and it’s only in the last 20 years that they’ve grudgingly got up to speed with fuel economy standards.
Anyway, your theory could easily be checked out by investigating lung cancer rates by geographical area. People living in the boondocks would presumably have lower rates than people in the city.
Here’s a bit of interesting data:
They’re very coy about what causes non-smoking-related lung cancer. It’s just “very complicated”, and the page implies that genetics is a big factor. I’m going to put my tinfoil hat on and suggest that somebody knows exactly what’s going on here and isn’t saying so.
Depends what you mean by ‘organic’, but again you could find out whether pesticides are the problem by, for example, surveying people on their consumption of items that are known to have high pesticide residues, checking cancer rates around farms which use known carcinogenic chemicals, etc. I find it hard to believe that these obvious studies haven’t been done. And if they have, why aren’t the findings and the recommendations being shouted from the rooftops?
EDIT: how about that … nobody has ever really bothered to check whether pesticides cause cancer.
The findings are preliminary, Abdi said, and one limitation of the analysis was that the researchers found only 16 studies done to date that met their criteria for inclusion. “This highlights the need for more large-scale, prospective studies,” she added.
Another limitation was that most of the studies included in the meta-analysis didn’t offer precise data about the amounts of pesticides the people were exposed to, she said. In only three studies did the researchers measure the levels of compounds linked with pesticides in the participants’ blood, for example. Others relied on questionnaires.
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This is a pretty typical scene in the Science Park. Willy nilly spraying of insecticide without any notification or the operators wearing any kind of protection at all. We get notices sometimes when they spray the inside of the buildings, assuring us that they are safe, but I somehow doubt it. BTW, there is a kindergarten with open windows alongside this street.
I have no idea if this is contributing factor, it would be hard to know as the employees in the park are transient, but this coupled with car exhaust so thick you can’t breath, temples spewing out smoke, unsafe food practices (but delicious), plasticizers etc in foods, and a high stress sedentary lifestyle must raise the risks.
If I live here much longer either the environment or the traffic will take me - likely the traffic - as yesterday I got almost creamed by a driver who was angry I dared cross the intersection when the walk sign was on.
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It’s bullshit translation.
Original text:
經濟學人智庫引用世界衛生組織（WHO）新近統計數字指出，台灣人因為癌症造成過早死亡或失能的生命損失年數（DALY）的比率超過二成八，在亞太地區多國當中高居首位，且又以肝癌、肺癌影響最鉅。
It means cancer accounts for 28% of DALYs in Taiwan, not 28% of the population die of cancer. The age standardised cancer mortality rate of Taiwan is not even top 30 world wide. Denmark, the supposedly perfect country, is the worst, for example. The Netherlands and France are also worse than Taiwan. I guess they just drink or smoke like a lot.
It is higher than other countries in the region like Japan and Korea. They definitely have a far healthier diet.
Source: ALL CANCERS DEATH RATE BY COUNTRY
It doesn’t have Taiwan’s data but according to official stats in 2014 the age standardised cancer mortality rate in Taiwan is around 130-135 per 100k.
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Can I blame 15 million scooters emitting CO2 on this? Pleeeease? Can I?
I agree the amount of scooters in Taiwan is a out of control.
I ride a scooter myself and do feel the convenience and benefits of it.
What I like to see is, instead of banning scooter or raise the tax crazy high.
Maybe there should be a program of some kind to encourage innovation of scooter technology into a more environmental friendly tech.
This will allow people highly dependent on small, individual transportation, like myself, to continue our way of life. And to also have an environmentally friendly and healthier solution to the issue.