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| Comments on Monday 26 January 2004: |
| Oh no! Scare mongering! "Hair Dye May Raise Cancer Risk, U.S. Study Shows". Apparently, women who've been dying their hair dark colours for 24 years or more are twice as likely to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer. 54000 Americans per year are affected by non-Hodgkin lymphoma per year. Since we don't know what percentage dye their hair, we can't calculate proper figures, but the worst-case scenario is that if nobody in America dyes their hair now, then hair-dye could potentially double the figure, which would mean a 54000 in population-of-America chance of hair dye causing you cancer. Using 250 million as a loose 'population of America' figure, that's about a one in four thousand chance of hair dye causing you cancer for each year after the twenty-fourth that you've been using it. Which isn't very high. Only about a third of the figure are killed by the cancer, so we can knock that down to one in twelve thousand chance of dying of hair. Except! "Hair coloring products have undergone tremendous change over the last 20 years," added Zheng. "Since 1980, many carcinogens have been removed from some formulas."So, in fact, the study tells us that you could minimise your risk by going back in time and not using hair dye before I was born. Lucky for me my parents didn't go in for partial-birth hair-colouring, no matter what the Bible said. Modern hair dyes are unlikely to maintain even close to that level of risk of causing cancer, though scientists have discovered that modern hair dye may quadruple the risk of getting super powers from cosmic radiation. [05:22] |