Cancer causes may differ depending on the type. Any organism including plants can develop cancer. Cells that replicate, suffer from errors and this causes mutations. Unless proper prevention is carried out, the errors will survive and might be passed along to daughter cells. The body normally safeguards against diseases such as cancer through apoptosis, senescence among other processes. Often this error correction methods fail especially in environments that make the errors more likely to propagate. One such is an environment that has disruptive substances called carcinogens.

Mutagens are substances that cause DNA mutations. Mutagens that cause cancers are known as carcinogens. Tobacco smoking and prolonged exposure to asbestos fibers are other causes. Cancer is a progressive disease because the errors slowly accumulate until such a time when the cells begin to act contrary to their bodily functions. Cancer development is like a chain reaction. A few errors compound into more severe errors. Errors that produce more errors are the root cause.

If for example there were 9000 cancerous cells and one kills all but 10 of these cells, these cells could still replicate and start the process all over again. This is an undesirable phenomenon of survival of the fittest where the forces of evolution work against the body’s design and enforcement order .Once cancer has begun to develop, the same forces continue to push the progression of the disease into an advanced stage. This is called clonal evolution.

Radon gas which is a source of ionizing radiation and prolonged exposure to ultraviolet radiation are other cancer causes. Non-ionizing radio frequency radiation from devices such as mobile phones and other sources have been suggested to cause cancer but there is very little evidence to support this claim. Cancer can also be as a result of viral or bacterial infection.

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