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by chasil 1259 days ago
This particular virus has a solid link to various forms of cancer:

"[Epstein–Barr virus] has also been implicated in several other diseases, including Burkitt's lymphoma, hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis, Hodgkin's lymphoma, stomach cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, multiple sclerosis, and lymphomatoid granulomatosis.".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein%E2%80%93Barr_virus#Rol...
1 comments
dekhn 1258 days ago
The word "implicated" in science normally means "correlated with" and can't really be considered a "solid link".

Some of the articles cited in that section have sentences like "1 out 2 (50%) adult analyzed cases was positive, with 50% of stained tumor cells (this patient was a 22 years old female, coming from Napoli);" that don't follow the necessary standard of evidence. I continued to skim the linked articles and they are all clearly correlative.

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chasil 1258 days ago
This article appeared today.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34367905

"...several herpes viruses, which two-thirds of us carry, induce tumors in animal species."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4353788/

"A herpes virus causes Burkett's lymphoma in humans; another causes nasopharyngeal cancer in humans."

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dekhn 1258 days ago
It's a lot more subtle than that. First off let me say that historically, demonstrating that a virus causes cancer has been a major bit of work, and many times people have mistakenly seen associations and falsely believed they were causal. second, I don't deny there are some cancers which are caused by viruses. But, you're referencing extremely rare cancers, not the cancers that make up the bulk of US (or world) deaths from cancer. My complaint is about taking these relatively rare situations and implying there's some sort of general underlying well-understood cause, when the reality is, in many situations, the virus itself did not specifically "cause" the cancer, but for complex biological reasons, it's "associated" with the cancer (which could manifest as increased susceptibility to getting particular types, or worse prognosis, or even possibly better outcome).
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