Cancer risk down for Southern California amid diesel pollution

Southern California’s air is still one of the dirtiest in the U.S., but a new study showed that the cancer risk from air pollution is down 15 percent there.

About 1,200 of every million of people will get cancer because of pollutions if they live about 70 years, health experts said. An acceptable level is 10 cases for every one million people.

The main reason for the cancer is a significant diesel use in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The risk more than doubled for people living there.

Cancer is a group of diseases in which cells are aggressive (grow and divide without respect to normal limits), invasive (invade and destroy adjacent tissues), and sometimes metastatic (spread to other locations in the body).

These three malignant properties of cancers differentiate them from benign tumors, which are self-limited in their growth and do not invade or metastasize (although some benign tumor types are capable of becoming malignant).

Cancer may affect people at all ages, even fetuses, but risk for the more common varieties tends to increase with age. Cancer causes about 13% of all deaths.

According to the ACS, 7.6 million people died from cancer in the world during 2007. Apart from humans, forms of cancer may affect other animals and plants.