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Analysis confirms that cancer may be primarily caused by viruses, suggesting a shift in understanding disease origins.
The 9 Bradford Hill causality criteria — the same standard used to establish that smoking causes lung cancer, asbestos causes mesothelioma, H. pylori causes gastric cancer (Nobel 2005), and HPV causes cervical cancer (Nobel 2008) — are here applied to the viral hypothesis of cancer. They are satisfied. All 9. Three times. With three independent series of evidence. 33 independent lines of evidence — epidemiological, biological, mechanistic, pharmacological — converge on a single conclusion: cancer is essentially viral. Alternative theories satisfy: genetics 4/9 — environmental 6/9 — lifestyle 7/9. The data are theirs. The journals are theirs. The studies are theirs.Someone simply lined them up for the first time.
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Luciano Imbimbo (2026) studied this question.
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