The story about the Sea King helicopter pilot Zach Stubbings who developed cancer, presumed to be caused by years of breathing in exhaust fumes from the Sea King's engine, has developed in a very interesting way. It's getting a high profile because Prince William has spent plenty of hours flying Sea Kings, and there are a good many other examples of ex-pilots developing cancers.
This particular pilot has Multiple Myeloma and has been through intensive chemo and a stem cell transplant.
Conventional wisdom is that the cause(s) of myeloma remain unknown. There is some slight and anecdotal evidence of an inherited element, and statistics show that it is more common in black and asian populations than in white ones. There is no evidence that I am aware of to link it to environmental factors except a possible slight connection to particles in Sea King exhaust fumes.
It is of course possible that his myeloma is entirely random (like mine, as far as I know) and has no connection at all to his helicoptering.
There's a short(ish) report in the Telegraph and a longer and more rambling, but also more interesting one in the Daily Mail. I haven't yet followed the story any further and AFAIK it hasn't appeared yet in any of the online myeloma places I routinely visit.
Here's one extract from the Mail's piece:
‘Around that time a doctor said he couldn’t understand what had triggered multiple myeloma. It normally affects people, largely ethnic minorities, in their 60s and 70s — not fit, white thirtysomethings. That’s when I began to dig deeper.’
Just one in 50,000 people are diagnosed with multiple myeloma, only two per cent under 40. With time on his hands after his first marriage ended in 2015, Zach began searching on the internet and came across a paper linking diesel exhaust to instances of the disease in firefighters.
He put in a request under the Freedom of Information Act asking if any reports had been done into exhaust fumes and the Sea King. He received the 1999 report and three more followed.'
Now wondering whether the diesel fumes I inhaled while standing on the stern of a narrowboat may have been more unpleasant than I thought at the time... But if so you would expect a high enough incidence of myeloma in canal boaters to have been noticed.
(Stock photo - that's fairly obviously not me at the tiller)
Continuing the process of getting everything working with the new ultrafast broadband now I've got the printer sorted, I did the car this afternoon (it updates itself over WiFi) but I'm having trouble with the Thermomix. Eventually resorted to a Factory Reset but it wouldn't even do that. It's now off and unplugged and I'll try again in an hour or two. It worked perfectly making spreadable butter this morning...
No comments:
Post a Comment