Human effect on the atmosphere leads to skin cancer in fish

A whopping 15% of the fish surveyed had melanoma. … While 15% sounds high, Sweet and his colleagues believe it’s only a minimum estimate. “Once the cancer spreads further you would expect the fish to become quite sick, becoming less active and possibly feeding less, hence less likely to be caught. This suggests the actual percentage affected by the cancer is likely to be higher than observed in this study.”….

Fish with Melanoma – Our Enduring Environmental Legacy Scientific American. By Christie Wilcox | August 1, 2012 | We’ve all heard the horror stories. Melanoma is one of the most dangerous kinds of skin cancer, killing around 50,000 people worldwide every year. If caught early enough, it can be cured, but once it invades past the skin, it’s deadly. On the advice of doctors, we try to protect ourselves, donning floppy hats and coat upon coat of SPF 50 sunblock. We pick over our bodies in the mirror regularly, looking for dark, irregularly-shaped spots. . The recent rise in the incidence of skin cancer, though, is our own fault.

It is the result of our environmental hubris, a combination of a chemically-depleted ozone layer and our pathological obsession with a tanned physical appearance. Now, we’re becoming increasingly aware that our choices don’t just impact our own species. The rest of life has to deal with our poor decisions, and studies are just now determining the wide-ranging consequences of our actions.
Unable to slather on sunscreen, the creatures on our planet are much more limited in their ability to deal with the sun’s radiation……drastic changes in UV radiation are exactly what occurred in the late 20th century, when chemicals we used as refrigerants and in aerosol sprays quickly depleted one of the most UV-protecting molecules, ozone, from our atmosphere. From 1972 to 1992, places like Australia saw a 20% increase in UV radiation levels, and colder areas like Antarctica saw ozone decreases of 50 percent or more, creating large ozone holeswhich allow more than double the normal level of UV radiation to pass through……

We are only now beginning to fully document the consequences of ozone depletion. In people, the loss of ozone at the end of the 20th century was directly connected to a 16 to 60 percent increase in the incidence of skin cancer. But while we carefully documented the effects on our own species, little research has looked for health effects on other animals. Now, Australian scientists have found an entire population of fish plagued with the deadliest form of skin cancer: melanoma….. A whopping 15% of the fish surveyed had melanoma. … While 15% sounds high, Sweet and his colleagues believe it’s only a minimum estimate. “Once the cancer spreads further you would expect the fish to become quite sick, becoming less active and possibly feeding less, hence less likely to be caught. This suggests the actual percentage affected by the cancer is likely to be higher than observed in this study.”….

If UV is the cause, then it’s really our fault. “The occurrence of this disease in today’s day and age and not before can be linked to the changes we are experiencing in our climate and the ozone hole,” …..

With little natural protection against UV rays, fish and most other species are at our mercy when it comes to radiation-induced disease. Skin cancer only adds to a growing list of pathological consequences to our poor ecological choices – a list which includes devastating diseases like chytridiomycosis and avian malaria. Until we change the way we treat the world around us, that list will continue to grow, while the abundance and vitality of our planet’s biodiversity shrinks. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2012/08/01/fish-with-melanoma-our-enduring-environmental-legacy/

August 2, 2012 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, oceans

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