Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Stuff: Another safety bulletin from the Department of Crazy Crap You Didn't Even Know You Had to Fear.

At the Department of Crazy Crap You Didn't Even Know You Had to Fear (DCCYDEKYHF) scientists, like the one pictured above, work tirelessly around the clock to find and overstate the risks of unlikely threats to your health and happiness.

Today's overblown threat: Rosy Palm and her five sisters are out to kill you.

A new paper in the British Journal of Urology International (BJU) reports a statistically significant correlation between masturbation and prostate cancer. That's right, according to the fine folks at PopSci.com, your only truly successful long-term relationship might be giving you cancer.

Let's look at the numbers:

The BJU study, conducted by a team from the University of Nottingham in England, looked at one group of 431 men who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer before the age of 60, and 409 men who did not have the disease. Of the 431 men with cancer, 40 percent of the men reported masturbating or engaging in sexual activity more than 20 times a month during their 20’s. Additionally, the cancer group also had a larger percentage of men who reported having more than six female partners in their life. And the men in the cancer group were also more likely to report having once had a sexually transmitted disease.

Not that every scientist, not unlike the one pictured above, is ready to commit to the idea that flogging the bishop makes your cells go all kill-kill-kill.

But doctors disagree over the link between sexual activity and prostate cancer. While a 2002 paper in the journal Epidemiology backs the BJU study, a 2004 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and a 2003 paper from the Australian Cancer Council Victoria claim that frequent masturbation and intercourse actually decreases the risk of prostate cancer.

Two versus one – good enough for the scientists, all very much like the one pictured above, of the DCCYDEKYHF to raise the alarm. Remember, when you shake hands with Yul Brynner, you shake hands with death.

3 comments:

Shon Richards said...

I finally sympathize with smokers who refuse to quit.

Anonymous said...

I'm sure there's a Jack Chick tract on this too..

spacejack said...

This isn't really related and only has a few horror references, but I thought you'd get a kick out of these 1960s-style cover designs for non-existent novelizations of movies.