Since President Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer over 40 years ago, survival rates have improved dramatically and cancer rates have even gone down, despite claims that everything from DDT to nuclear energy to genetically modified foods would cause a cancer epidemic.

Yet not all cancer survival has improved. Pancreatic cancer still has  the lowest survival rate of the 21 most common cancers, and in 40 years just over 3 percent of pancreatic cancer patients survive for at least five years, only a fraction more than the 2 percent who survived that long in the early 1970s.

Human milk is obviously baby food, but for sick, hospitalized infants, it's also medicine, according to a series of articles in Advances in Neonatal Care devoted to best practices in providing human milk to hospitalized infants. 

"The immunological and anti-inflammatory properties of human milk are especially important for the critically ill infants in our intensive care units," said Diane L. Spatz, Ph.D., R.N.-B.C., FAAN, nurse researcher and director of the Lactation Program at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and the invited guest editor of the August 2014 issue of the journal, published by the National Association of Neonatal Nurses.

You aren't always what you eat – and that's a good thing. It's also why pesticides in reasonable usage haven't harmed arctic mammals such as caribou. Not only can caribou metabolize some current-use pesticides ingested in vegetation, they also limit the exposure of humans, including those who eat caribou.

Brain tumors avoid the body's defense forces by coating their cells with extra amounts of a specific protein - they use biological stealth technology to evade detection by the early-warning immune system that should detect and kill them. By the time the tumors are detected it's too late for the body to defeat them. 

The findings in mice and rats show the key role of a protein called galectin-1 in some of the most dangerous brain tumors, called high grade malignant gliomas. They had actually been trying to study how the extra production of galectin-1 by tumor cells affects cancer's ability to grow and spread in the brain.

BRCA1/2 genes are the most important breast cancer risks but after that, women with mutations in the PALB2 gene have on average a one in three chance of developing breast cancer by the age of seventy, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine.

In a study run through the international PALB2 Interest Group a team of researchers from 17 centres in eight countries led by the University of Cambridge analysed data from 154 families without BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutations, which included 362 family members with PALB2 gene mutations. The effort was funded by the European Research Council, Cancer Research UK and multiple other international sources.

Aspirin has been linked to a significant reduction in the risk of developing – and dying from – the major cancers of the digestive tract, i.e. bowel, stomach and esophageal cancer in a recent Annals of Oncology paper. Some have been concerned about side effects, such as instances of bleeding, due to aspirin.

The review of the available evidence assessed both the benefits and harms of preventive use of aspirin. The researchers, led by Professor Jack Cuzick, Head of  Queen Mary University of London's Centre for Cancer Prevention, found taking aspirin for 10 years could cut bowel cancer cases by around 35% and deaths by 40%. Rates of esophageal and stomach cancers were cut by 30% and deaths from these cancers by 35-50%.