Higher Cancer Risk for US Flight Crew

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The average flight attendant might well spend the equivalent of 120 working days in the sky each year, or in some countries even longer. Now new research confirms that this much flying time could be a risk to health, with flight attendants having an increased chance of getting several different types of cancer. Dr Irina Mordukhovich, who is a Research Associate at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health compared American flight attendants with an equivalent subset of the US population in a study that is larger than many and includes some cancers for the first time. The results have just been published in the journal Environmental Health. In a few places in the world – India, Afghanistan, in Nepal along the border with Indian – some women are deliberately set on fire by their husbands or mother in law. Maybe the husband is unhappy about the dowry, or the mother-in-law is unhappy about having granddaughters instead of grandsons. And sometimes women even set themselves on fire, seeing immolation as the only escape from forced labour or repeated beatings. It is very hard to determine the exact numbers, but some women do survive what is known as bride burning, leaving them with not just physical problems but psychological difficulties too. Joanne Silberner has been to Nepal to visit a counsellor working to support some of these women and reports back for Health Check. People tend to associate high levels of testosterone with virility and manliness, but in fact it is more about building up muscle mass and finding a mate. Testosterone levels do vary a lot; going up in competitive situations and down once men have children. Now new research suggests that what really matters is where you spent the first seven or eight years of their life, and that this can dictate testosterone levels in adulthood. Gillian Bentley, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Durham, is the senior author of the paper, which has just been published in Nature, Ecology and Evolution. (Photo: Getty Images)