Women who cook on a daily basis without using a kitchen exhaust fan are nearly 1.8 times more likely to suffer from lung adenocarcinoma, a form of small-cell lung cancer, than those who do not cook, a study by the Genetic Epidemiology of Lung Cancer in Taiwan (GELAC) released yesterday showed.
The GELAC research team that conducted the study was comprised of representatives from the National Health Research Institutes (NHRI), Academia Sinica, National Taiwan University and several hospitals. They made public their findings at a two-day health forum in Taipei yesterday.
NHRI Institute of Population Sciences director Hsiung Chao (熊昭), one of the members of the team, said that nearly 90 percent of female patients with lung adenocarcinoma have never smoked, yet lung cancer has been the leading cause of cancer deaths among Taiwanese women for the past decade.
“The research team monitored the health conditions of 1,200 female lung adenocarcinoma patients and 1,200 healthy women since 2002 and found four major risk factors for lung cancer: tuberculosis, family medical history, second-hand smoke, and cooking fumes,” Hsiung said.
Hsiung said that women who have contracted tuberculosis are 2.9 times more susceptible to lung cancer, while those who have a family history of lung cancer or who have been exposed to secondhand smoke are 2.6 times and 1.5 times more likely respectively to contract the disease.
“In addition, women who have cooked three meals a day for 48 years are 1.78 times more likely to get lung cancer, but they could lower that risk by 43 percent by always having a kitchen range hood on while cooking,” Hsiung said.
National Taiwan University principal Yan Pan-chyr (楊泮池), a lung cancer expert, said that lung cancer is a multifactorial disease and that more than half of patients who develop it do not experience any symptoms in the early stages of the disease.
“Nearly 75 percent of patients with lung cancers are diagnosed at an advanced stage and less than 20 percent of them live more than five years past their diagnosis,” Yang said.
Yang said that people aged 45 and older who are at high risk of developing lung cancer are advised to undergo routine low-dose computed tomography screening, which can detect lung nodules as small as 0.2cm to 0.3cm in diameter.
“Patients who have tumors that are less than 1cm wide when diagnosed typically have a 97 percent five-year survival rate, while that survival rate drops to approximately 80 percent for those with tumors ranging between 1cm and 2cm,” Yang said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching