Diseases/Conditions

Chemotherapy Causes DNA Mutations and Birth Defects

February 13, 2012 by admin in Pharmaceuticals with 2 Comments

Graphic by 2EDevelopmentTeam, rotated, cropped, with minor modifications. Click image to see Flickr Photostream.

The offspring of male mice given common chemotherapy drugs are more likely to suffer from birth defects—and their children’s descendants also carry the defective genes. So, chemotherapy can permanently alter DNA. Damaged DNA and birth defects are permanently inherited by all the descendants of a single person treated with chemotherapy.

One of the authors, Yuri Dubrova, a UK geneticist at the University of Leicester, pointed out that most people treated for cancer are either too old to procreate or are rendered sterile from the treatment. He stated:

So we’re talking about one group only: childhood cancer survivors.

Only? Only childhood cancer survivors? And what was that about most people being rendered sterile from chemotherapy? At least there’s an up-side to that sterility: no chance of passing on chemo-defective genes that cause all descendants to carry defective DNA.

The study, titled “Exposure to anticancer drugs can result in transgenerational genomic instability in mice” and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, looked at the effects of three commonly-used types of chemotherapy: cyclophosphamide, mitomycin C, and procarbazine. The researchers looked at only one region of the mouse genome.

They found that mutations incurred by chemotherapy were twice as common in the offspring. They also found that the offspring had several times the number of egg and sperm mutations than the offspring of mice treated with radiation. This is an indication that the generational teratogenic effects of chemotherapy may be worse than the effects of radiation.

Evidence-Based Medicine?

The unintended results of chemotherapy on noncancerous cells is called the bystander effect. The term doesn’t refer to results on later generations, but only those on nontargeted cells.

What does this tell us about the nature of modern medicine’s proudly paraded evidence-based medicine?

It makes clear that the only evidence the Medical Monopoly Mafia (MMM) cares about is the cherry-picked and paid-for type that appears to support the use of profitable treatments. Awareness of the existence of bystander effects is avoided.

It isn’t until years have gone by—years filled with enormous profits for the MMM—that real research provides real evidence for the real results of those treatments.

The full effects of most medical treatments are negative, a fact so clearly demonstrated in hormone replacement therapy, which has been shown to increase the diseases it was supposedly preventing and was nearly universally applied to women at the first sign of menopause. The harm done is greater, often massively greater, than any benefit received. And far too often, there are no actual benefits that might justify some of that risk.

Use of Chemotherapy in Non-Cancer Patients

Not addressed by the study’s authors is the fact that chemotherapy drugs are no longer limited to cancer patients. They are routinely used in rheumatoid arthritis, sickle-cell anemia, lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, and macular degeneration. The use of these chemicals for noncancer treatment is being heavily researched as Big Pharma seeks to find ever-more ways to sell their products.

The Medical Monopoly Mafia is using its fraudulent evidence-based medicine to push chemotherapy that is not only known to have devastating effects on the person treated, it’s now shown to have ongoing and permanent effects on future generations. The study referenced in this article focused only on the effects in mice. The fact, though, is that we have no reason to believe that human DNA is affected any differently. Until we do, the reasonable assumption before the use of any of these drugs must be that future generations may be harmed.

By what right does anyone utilize these treatments when the potential is so devastating? The future of humanity is, quite literally, at risk. The MMM has much for which it must answer, including what it’s doing to future generations.