About that latest ‘cancer cure’

Perhaps you saw an article in the Jerusalem Post this week, one in which an Israeli company promised “a complete cure for cancer” in just a year. The claim, based on a study in mice, is more than a little eyebrow-raising, but that didn’t stop the story from being credulously promoted millions of times across the internet.

And that, STAT’s Matt Herper writes, is a problem. The odds of an early-stage cancer treatment making it from the clinic to the pharmacy is something like 30 to 1. And for the treatment in question, not yet in human trials, success is an even bigger longshot. Which makes the breathless promotion that much more dangerous.

“Jonathan Swift noted that a lie can traverse the world while the truth limps behind it 300 years ago,” Herper writes. “In the age of social media, the problem seems as though it has gotten worse.”

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