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Asked by altair to Ailsa, Evan, James, Kath, Ryan on 20 Jun 2011.
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Ailsa Powell answered on 20 Jun 2011:
There many different types of cancer and there are many different causes of cancer, so there can never be a single cure. There are treatments available to fight some cancers already and they do kill the cancerous cells, these can be either chemicals or radiation. Because cancerous cells are our own cells that have gone wrong the treatments also damage healthy cells as they can’t tell the difference between the normal cell and the cancerous cell – not in the same way you can kill bacteria cells that make you ill. This is why people being treated for cancer often lose their hair so seem to get sicker instead of better, but ultimately the cancer cells should die and then the rest of the persons body can recover.
Coming up with new cancer treatments is a massive task and yet there are treatments developed against specific cancers because there are thousands and thousands of scientists working on these problems, which is amazing.
I answered a question about cures for cancer earlier in the project, here is the answer I gave then http://ias.im/44.96
Hope that answers your question, if you want more explained just ask another question 🙂
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Ryan Ladd answered on 20 Jun 2011:
There are currently many ways to deal with cancer, from chemical therapies (what they call chemo), to focused beams of radiation to kill specific cells to surgery to simply cut the cancerous cells away. There are a number of drugs which can also help against cancer.
Unfortunately, there are many types of cancer which can’t be cured at the moment but there are lots of scientists working on it, so maybe one day we’ll be able to cure all cancer.
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Evan Keane answered on 20 Jun 2011:
I think Ailsa and Ryan have already answered this quite well, but I just wanted to say I am very impressed with your astronomy-themed profile name. Nice one! 😉
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