For how we live.
Face, arm, speech, time is the message that saves lives. But in one US stroke centre 14% of ischaemic strokes had no FAST sign at all — and every minute of delay costs an estimated 1.9 million neurons.
No study shows that eating sugar worsens cancer, phones do not damage genes, and biopsies rarely spread it. A guide to what the National Cancer Institute actually concludes about the most persistent myths.
Most lumps are not cancer — swollen glands usually signal infection, and most breast changes are benign. A few features shift the calculus: hard, fixed, growing, or paired with night sweats or weight loss.
There is no reliable screening test, so symptoms matter. Bloating, feeling full quickly, pelvic pain and urinary urgency — new, frequent and persistent — are the cluster a 2007 study built into a symptom index.
Most bowel symptoms are not cancer. But a 2023 study of early-onset cases identified four signs — rectal bleeding, abdominal pain, diarrhoea and iron-deficiency anaemia — that recur before diagnosis in the under-50s.
Five grams a week is the top of a wide range in one 2020 analysis. A mechanistic model put the mass humans actually ingest at micrograms, not grams.
Storm surge warnings that described likely damage rather than just naming the phenomenon increased people's stated evacuation intentions — with the biggest effect on people who'd never evacuated before.
Four years after the virus was first detected in south-eastern Australia, interviews in Tamworth find eligibility for a free vaccine has not translated into uptake.