Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame (I mention this a lot as I read these to my children as an adult, and they’re a fascinating look at 1880s America) has lots of places where her mother says “put on your bonnet! Don’t get too much sun!”. We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, all of Chesterton’s fences were torn down during that time period.
They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside.
They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up.
There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.
People with light skin should always wear a hat that fully covers the head/face in tropical/equatorial climates (okay, good so far) or else the powerful sun rays will penetrate the skull (?) causing brain damage that will make you go insane (!?!?)
Victorians may have inadvertently protected themselves against excess mortality due to melanomas with their pith helmets, but it’s pretty hard to argue they were actually “correct” with modern hindsight considering the entire chain of reasoning was wrong.
(For example, you see this in Kipling’s writing where he’ll randomly include an ominous case of some guy who forgot/lost his hat and promptly had to be committed to an insane asylum, as one does).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Dogs_and_Englishmen_(song)
That's like a resident of Porto saying most people don't get frostbite walking around outside in winter...
San Francisco is at a southern European latitude. It’s a lot worse in the tropics.
Naturally darker skin does not automatically provide sunburn protection. It is spending time in the sun that adds the missing part that provide that protection. I don't know how this differs from dark skin, but I've seen it myself.
Note that my claims are only about sunburn. The article/topic is skin cancer which may well have different factors from sunburn.
Note that I'm making no claims on how natural sunburn resistant affects skin cancer.
melanin is also not the only factor in preventing sunburn/cancer. there are many repair pathways and genes, which are present to differing levels in various populations.
I say this from experience. I am a black person who is not particularly dark skinned, and have only had the slightest sunburn once in my life, after I had been working in a field for 16 hours straight in full sun under clear sky detasseling corn. When I got back to camp, the back of my neck seemed slightly sensitive, which was unusual. It was fine the next morning, and never peeled at all. I did the same for 2 weeks, and this was the only time I felt this. This was the worst sunburn (if it was one) that I've gotten in 50 years of life. I've spent plenty of time outside, and plenty of time inside being a code monkey and never going outside. I've never worn sunscreen.
I've never met a black person as brown as a paper bag who ever got a sunburn, at least that I know of. My dad is pretty pale, I think I would have heard about it.
We both get sunburns. My even darker grandmother got sunburns. My Black friends get sunburns. I am not sure that you are correctly correlating your experience with actual facts about the sunburn resistance offered by melanin.
Unrelated, he also swore he couldn't get poison ivy, until he literally rolled in it to prove it to me. I found the aftermath more amusing than he did.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/t-d/pubs/htmlpubs/htm07672313/index....
All cultures (including mine), have a way to warn kids, or adults for not to stay too long in the sun. From normal sunburn, to feeling light-headenes/fainting due to heat excaustion, etc.
In the winter was the opposite. (stay in the sun to get some sunlight and not get sick).
So, they knew, and had nothing to do with 'class'. Also, they knew some sun was good/beneficial, especially during the winter.
We have an old saying "te rafte pika e diellit", may you get a spot, sun spot, aka cancer from the Sun.
People knew excessive sun is unhealthy.... if you could you avoid it during the summer. It was not necessary to make you look 'rich'. Ability to avoid it, meant you were rich. And people wanted to be pale, because you look rich, that is a second order effect, that came because of the original reason (aka, too much sun is unhealthy).
I think you are retro analyzing and presuming individual intelligence because this collective result looks right to you. Really, some people understand some risks and many people who can follow taboos they can afford are not exactly sure what they would learn first hand and what part is superstition.
A young MD full of himself? I may be a bit sceptical about his know-it-all attitude.
"Hm, whom to trust, a person who went to university and follow-on education for nigh a decade, oorrrrrrrrrr.... something someone posted on Facebook that just so happens to confirm what my own ignorance told me was likeliest?"
I grew up in the same general region as Wilder, and we sought shade not to avoid sunburn. We were all chestnut brown by the end of summer anyway. It's because the direct sunlight on an August afternoon was brutally hot, and you wanted as little of it to hit your skin as possible.
I'd say partly true, mostly false. As sibling comment mentions, much of this was driven by fashion and class etc. and not from some fundamental understanding of damaging UV exposure.
Furthermore there was research that was trendy at the time called "heliotherapy" [0] where all sorts of diseases were believed curable by sun exposure, including smallpox, TB, etc.
Like, I doubt that fixing a vitamin D deficiency is going to cure you of smallpox or TB, but could imagine a path where it helped at least.
I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.
So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)
I thought you were going to talk about the ingredients in the cream were carcinogenic themself.
Scurvy is like that. They figured out that if you give sailors a ration of fresh fruit juice they don't get scurvy - this works because the fresh fruit juice has Vitamin C and Scurvy is just Vitamin C deficiency. But they didn't know why it worked - why would a cow, a mango, a lettuce, and indeed basically everything else have a chemical in it that humans can't synthesize ? That's crazy. Except, nope, that's really what's going on. At some point an ancestor deleted the synthesis pathway for this chemical, their offspring weren't bothered because fresh literally everything has the chemical anyway, so the deletion stuck around.
At the same time ships get quite a lot faster, travel across the Atlantic is now rapid enough that even if you deliberately abstained from Vitamin C you wouldn't get scurvy, your body hoards many chemicals it needs (a few must be made "fresh" but most can be hoarded) and only develops issues when the hoarded ascorbic acid is exhausted after a few weeks. But they don't know that, and so when they swap a working solution (store fruit, squeeze the juice out, drink fresh juice) for a non-working solution (squeeze the juice, preserve that, drink preserved juice) the apparent results do not change.
Until they do something more extreme. Go to Antarctica, which is incredibly hostile to life anyway, and then stay there for months. Despite your magic preserved fruit juice you get scurvy. The juice wasn't magic, and eventually you will figure out it was the freshness which was magic and from there that there really is a chemical found in cows, mango, lettuce and basically everything alive which we cannot synthesize. Ascorbic acid, Vitamin C.
It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer"
but, what if staying in the sun isn't binary?
and, what if everyday products did cause cancer? https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/cancer-concerns-from-e...
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4
https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupatio...
We never wore sunscreen as kids because we didn't burn. I probably have had three sunburns in my life. Learned once I became an adult that that wasn't sound logic...
But Australia has always had a famously robust sun health education programme
Although it was pretty sunny with clear blue skies, the air temperature was fairly chilly (shirt, jumper and fleece cold - and I'm Scottish so used to cold weather) and I started to burn. I was warned about this, and the probability of high UV exposure at altitude by the locals and family, and was advised to apply a high factor sunblock whilst roaming around the higher elevations of New Zealand's South Island, which I did.
However, I’ve never gotten so much as a whisper of sunburn / suntan / anything on an actually cloudy day where sun wasn’t hitting me directly. Is the damage a different type that’s imperceptible? Or is this a public health comms strategy where they assume people will see a single cloud in the sky and decide it’s fine to skip sunscreen, so they talk about how you should slather yourself with sunscreen 24/7, even if the sun is obscured?
So sun obscured != low UV. It will block some of it though.
Well done to the drug researchers. I have my fingers crossed someone else gets to avoid this
a recent study of 2 million people in ontario showed that both high-sun and low-sun exposed people had higher risk of melanoma than people with moderate exposure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4
https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupatio...
a possible explanation is that UV light stimulates repair pathways within the skin, which boosts the baseline level of repair.
Enhancement of UVB-induced DNA damage repair after a chronic low-dose UVB pre-stimulation
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15687...
another explanation is that as much as you can try to cover up, occasionally you may slip up, and going from extreme low-exposure to intense sun is especially bad, because your repair pathways are not primed, skin is untanned, etc..
in conclusion, extreme low or high sun exposure is bad. at the beginning of the summer you should gradually exposure yourself, and then exposure yourself daily but not overly, for the rest of the year.
I'd like to see the primary research backing that up. Or be told how I misinterpreted your statement.
Source: My Mohs surgeon. And 3 skin cancer surgeries (so far).
No this is insane news, the world is crazy and dumb. Must be all these LLMs. Stock up more than 150%, based on totally unpublished data and an X post...
- The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial. The phase 2 was open label, had only 50 controls, and its randomization was disrupted. Meaning 9 patients were reassigned and the final 37 were no longer randomized. Its primary RFS result was p=0.053 two-sided, with the 95% CI crossing 1. It also used an unusually permissive one-sided alpha of 0.10, and much of the later "confirmation" is just longer follow up of those same 157 patients...
- This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release. They have not published hazard ratio, or confidence interval, their event counts or survival curves.
- They met the endpoint as used in the press release means nothing, until they publish the actual 3 data, so my money is at the end this will be a kind of marginal effect that researchers will struggle to reproduce for years
Another type of study that will take 2 to 3 years to validate or dismiss, in the meanwhile stock is up 150%....
> This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release.
Can you find a case where a press release after phase 3 was later proven wrong? They do have the data, and most likely the data is positive. They're talking about FDA's approval as soon as late 2027, which is fairly soon.
Do you know what would be more dramatic than stock gaining 150%? that'd be the stock crashing if the press release turned out to be wrong. Follow the money if you are skeptical. See who's selling.
> The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial.
There are 1,100 patients in phase 3. More evidence that they're pretty confident.
This is great news.
Galera Therapeutics, Actimmune, leronlimab, roxadustat, tivozanib, aducanumab, tebipenem are all examples of Phase 3 massive failures.
>> This is great news.
Looking forward to the stock market reacting with the same level of due diligence show here, when the actual science data is published...in a still not announced distant future... :-)
These are patients who had melanoma surgically removed, and IF the unpublished data of phase 3 turn out to be true... you are looking at having improved survival rates after 2 to 3 years on 5 to 10% plus of the patients. That is ALL this still unknown announcement MIGHT mean.
From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.35463
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
tl;dr ~80% of Cutaneous melanoma cases are attributable to UV exposure.
OP did not say that melanoma has no sun exposure risk but that it is lower than the risks associated with other cutaneous cancers (e.g., SCC and BCC) and it would seem that's true based on the very short search I performed.
In a thread about a trial for a melanoma drug, which has nothing to do with the discussion of sunscreen. Sunscreen was brought up because it is a culture-war topic, the fact that melanomas are not as associated with sun exposure was brought up as the standard opposite-side reply to a culture-war topic.
Clearly your unrelated accusation was brought up to silence the other side and accuse them of dishonesty. Your follow-up is to accuse them of some conversational violation (mentioning something that wasn't brought up) which doesn't exist.
It's fine to see debate, but this is not debate. At most, consistent daily sunscreen use is associated with a 30-50% reduction in melanoma, and some of the ingredients in US sunscreens are themselves associated with cancer.
What would be helpful is a link to a study showing a general reduction in melanomas during a general increase in the use of sunscreen. I'd be able to point that out to friends who questioned me about the efficacy of using it.
edit: that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on. Now to mention this fact has become "bizarre." Can't wait until it becomes "unhinged."
This data [1] shows incidence of melanoma by the age of 30 dropping by half in Australia, presumably as a result of a sun safety campaign that started in the late 80s (not just encouraging sunscreen but also more shade, hats, covering up, etc.). Yet melanoma rates here in general increase but it’s more and more skewed towards the older.
1. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/cancer/cancer-data-in-austra...
To quote a blog post I wrote on why we can be confident sun exposure causes cancer: "Green et al. (2011) conducted a 10-year study (n=1621) in Nambour, a town in Queensland, Australia. Participants were randomly assigned to daily or discretionary sunscreen application. After 10 years, 11 melanomas were found in the daily group and 22 in the discretionary group."
But you should read the full post for more context on why we have much better data than randomized controlled trials, and why correlation studies on this subject are nearly useless due to the impossibility of finding reliable proxy variables: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/contra-byrnes-on-uv-...
Saying "some of the ingredients in US sunscreens are themselves associated with cancer" is meaningless without more specificity. As the meme goes, this HackerNews comment is known to the state of California to cause cancer: the bar for something to be "associated with cancer" is incredibly low. Are there any particular chemicals or chemical classes you were worried about?
And I will remind you that, in contrast, we are 100% sure that sunlight causes cancer. We know exactly what kinds of DNA damage it creates (chiefly cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers, which I discuss in my blog post) and we can find cancer-causing mutations in melanoma samples directly downstream of that damage (C->T mutations, for example, ones that disable the key p53 tumor suppressor gene). We know how this shit works! Are there some sunscreen formulas that might be dangerous? Possibly, I don't have them all memorized, but the solution is to find a different brand... not to instead expose yourself to one of the best-studied carcinogens around.
the comment you are replying to is HedonicEscal8r's first comment in this comment chain.
>that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on
no... it is correcting your comment that is accusing HedonicEscal8r of having multiple comments in this chain. HedonicEscal8r was not the one to make the comment that you describe as an "unrelated accusation" to "silence the other side".
common courtesy would be to say "oops, i didn't read the usernames, my bad" instead of accusing someone else entirely of "trying to snowball into a pile on" for calling you out on the mistake.
The original comment is misleading. Your reply is bizarre, and seems to deliberately misread the original comment, the reply, and the context.
The reply was reiterating HN rules, as well as adding data supporting the original statement.
By pointing out that it is true using a reference?
> the reply
The reply misunderstood the first comment and went on to discuss something a)interesting but b) not germane to whether melanoma is the skin cancer with the highest sun exposure risk.
I have no idea what you mean by context as this small discussion is quite self-contained. Think of this as making sure everyone realizes two homophones actually are distinct words.
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-moderna-announce-phase-...
Still no actual Phase 3 data presented.
So this should answer the question of "how much better is this with the best we currently have".
I wish this treatment was available a few years ago.
Enjoy the time you have with him now and be grateful for all the years you've had. Nothing is going to make the loss of a parent "OK" and it will hurt no matter if you see it coming like you are or it's a surprise.
Remember to breathe.
Melanoma is usually completely resistant to traditional cancer drugs. So that sometimes immune therapy works is very welcome.
It's hard seeing him like this. 63 years old. Going from completely functioning to non-verbal in 3 months fucks you up
Asymetrical (shape of the mole)
Border (irregular? Unclear delimitation?)
Color (has it multiple colors?)
Diameter (has it a >6mm diameter? An indicator that it might start vertical growth iirc)
Evolution (has it changed recently?)
Here's a great blog post on this, "How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time": https://www.owlposting.com/p/how-to-build-a-cancer-vaccine-a...
Here's the blog post I wrote on personalized mRNA vaccines: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/did-paul-conyngham-r...
Moderna used a simple heuristic, "how likely is this antigen to show up on the cell surface?" which makes sense, since an antigen has to show up on the cell surface for the immune system to see it. But there's so much missing from this model, and we just don't have enough data. Failures in clinical trials of mRNA vaccines may well be caused by this problem. (Yes, this is a good problem for AI, if we can get enough data).
The problem now is finding the correct antigens targeting the cancer cell type. Cancer cells are similar to health cells. You don't want to program a mRNA to generate antigen proteins that target health cells, which causes autoimmune problems.
Those few exceptions have been monumental in how they've changed cancer treatment. Skin cancer has been particularly well treated with immunotherapy, but other cancers have also benefited from the exact same research and drugs (as it turns out, the specific mutations the immunotherapies like Keytruda target express in other cancers). The reason skin cancer gets so much attention is because it's one of the most commonly diagnosed and treated cancers. (Colon is more common, I believe, but it often doesn't get detected. Get your colonoscopies folks).
It has moved fast enough that I've heard from multiple oncologists that the all 5 year survivability numbers are dated because the treatments are newer than the studies.
We've come a LONG way in a very short period in terms of cancer treatment. It still sucks, but not as much as it once did.
For non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (such as pembrolizumab, nivolumab, or atezolizumab), median overall survival typically ranges from about 10 to 20 months in advanced stages as opposed to 10-12 months for standard chemotherapy treatments.
That's great news especially as they would likely be better tolerated. Bt let's please not call living a handful of months longer as a 'revolution'.
"Almost never" is doing a lot of work. You may be aware that most drugs fail over the course of development and human trials?
Anyway, checkpoint inhibitor therapy is a massive boon to oncology and was only brought into widespread use over the past 15 years.
Having a plethora of drugs and treatments is vital because cancer is not "one thing". Each type of cancer will respond better to some treatments than others.
The comment is wrong because it's stupid. Just because we've known that personalized immunotherapy was a promising idea for a long time, and have been trying it with the limited tools we had (CAR T being the poster child, and while an incredible advancement for blood cancers and many other diseases, it is notoriously dangerous and expensive), does not mean we had the technology to accomplish it. Today's results are only possible because of recent advancements in multiple fields, and to respond with "they've tried immunotherapy for decades" is profoundly ignorant. You may as well say, "scientists have been trying to cure cancer for years."
My thoughts as well, Keytruda alone has been a miracle to many many people at this point (quoting GP: "scientists, for decades, have tired [sic] to harness the immune system to attack cancer and it almost never works."), I frequently get ads for local CAR-T centers (unthinkable a little over a decade ago)
Related stories:
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-and-modernas-per...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/merck-moderna-say-m...
https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/moderna-merck-vaccine-succ...
MRNA, as it happens, is the latter.
https://totalrealreturns.com/n/MRNA,SPY
MRNA has vastly outperformed the market since IPO.
I don't know if that counts as the same "trick" or not as it's another antiviral vaccine. Not that I disagree with you.
I read that this mRNA flu vaccine can be more effective then the regular annual flu shot, simply because the time to create it is shorter, therefor the guess at what strains will circulate that year is more accurate.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41701031/
But it is yet more validation. mRNA technology is here, get used to it.
Biotech is one of the very very very few areas of the stockmarket where specialist knowledge generates alpha.
Trolling through random biotechs, learning about their tech, and investing in the most promising applications of that tech in the most impactful areas is something that happens somewhat on publicly traded markets. With tech, most of that happens pre-IPO.
It’s similar to the situation where a company puts out a public offer to buy another company at say, $50 a share on a day that the acquisition target is trading at $40/share.
If the stock of the target company is trading at $46/share, the market is pricing in the probability of the acquisition not happening. If the market knew the acquisition would happen with 100% certainty, the price of the target company shares would be equal to the buyout share price offer. You can assume the risk of the acquisition not happening by purchasing shares at $46, and if it does end up going through, you earn $4 a share from assuming that risk.
I'm very very excited to see what comes next.
Are these two companies the ones to cure cancer (for the rich, being that these therapies require custom bio engineering).
I feel like everything companies, and presidents, say now is directly geared to triggering AI trades.
The only thing they are looking at with this drug is people living one more month over existing drugs.
THIS IS NOTHING.
"The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab,"
https://www.merck.com/news/keytruda-pembrolizumab-mercks-ant...
The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab, 95% CI, 0.46-0.72 for 2-week group and 0.47-0.72 for 3-week group, respectively). The estimated 6-month PFS rates for the KEYTRUDA and ipilimumab arms were 47.3 percent, 46.4 percent and 26.5 percent, respectively. One-year OS for KEYTRUDA was 74.1 percent (2-week group) and 68.4 percent (3-week group) compared to 58.2 percent for ipilimumab (HR 0.63 [95% CI, 0.47-0.83, P=0.00052] for the 2-week group and HR 0.69 [95% CI, 0.52-0.90, P=0.00358] for the 3-week group). At the time of analysis, median overall survival was not reached in any treatment group.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
3. This drug was approved for trial in 2014, so if it had something to do with deep learning, that would actually be a massive announcement.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
I was not pointing to PFS as OS.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
I did not say it was. I said it was written FOR AI trading algorithms to read and invest on.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
Someone noted this was an earlier study. The newest study does not even have data out and yet here we are, investing on a press release.
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
You are talking to someone whose father died of pancreatic cancer. "Pancreatic cancer has a higher mortality rate compared to melanoma, with an estimated 52,740 deaths from pancreatic cancer in 2026, while melanoma has a significantly lower death rate. Additionally, the 5-year relative survival rate for pancreatic cancer is only 13.7%, compared to higher survival rates for melanoma."
What they did for my father was worse than nothing.
Dying from late-stage cancer is often painful and miserable. It might be shocking, but getting just a few more months from chemo can provide a greater quality of life. Keyword can. Every oncologist is different with different recommendations, and they explain the risks very concretely. There is always an option to refuse treatment, but bear in mind it's not just about how quick you die. It's also about how much that dying sucks.
Sorry, you have no idea. Talk to a chemo nurse.
A friend's sister beat colon cancer over ten years ago but now is having liver problems that took a while to pin down. They warned her she'd probably die in a couple years from the cancer without Chemo, but would have this risk long term and it recently showed up.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/merck-and-moderna-...
>Postscript: Our Secretary of Health and Human Services of course cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine R&D contracts (22 different programs) last year, and cited a pile of misinformation (and cluelessly misunderstood research citations) to justify it. Our Director of the National Institutes of Health was apparently just fine with this decision and cited mRNA vaccines’ alleged failure to “earn public trust” as one of his reasons, along with public statements that “the mRNA platform is no longer viable”. I have a number of suggestions for each of these individuals and their supporters about how they might spend the rest of their day, and will be glad to send details if they contact me.
But even more is the validation of this new custom MRNA novel cancer treating platform. If you take this data result to be a 'proof of concept', the expected value of the rest of their pipeline is suddenly worth a lot more.
Of course, this is all assuming the data is accurate and the drug gets approved, neither of which are 100% guaranteed.
Vioxx was a long-term problem. Having that problem instead would be a great trade-off relative to untreated melanoma.
In actuality, even extremely aggressive therapies like high-dose chemotherapy with stem-cell transplant have shockingly low risk of death. Less than 5%. Bear in mind, that's for a therapy that literally wipes out all of your bone marrow. You know, the part of your body that produces your blood? Your body stops making blood and your immune system. And yet, we've gotten the death rate as low as it is.
And even if it did, it doesn't matter. You didn't read my comment at all. There are cancer treatments which can kill you outright, I know because I've received them. I think maybe you don't understand what cancer is. We can be very aggressive with the treatments. We have much, much bigger fish to fry than a small risk of myocarditis.