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In reply to the discussion: Venezuela to probe Chavez cancer poisoning accusation [View all]geek tragedy
(68,868 posts)1) As was noted I had in a discussion with someone else, cancer and carcinogens are stochastic, not determinative, causes of cancer at all but extreme doses (which would have other severe side effects due to toxicity etc). Stochastic means probabilistic and random, and unpredictable.
What this means is that if you give a certain dosage of a cancer inducing agent to say 100,000 people, you'll increase the odds of everyone getting cancer, but guaranteeing cancer for no one. And, what this may do is increase the rate of cancer from say 1500 out of 100,000 to 1650 out of 100,000.
In other words, it's highly, highly, highly unlikely-- even if you gave said cancer agent to a person in any appreciable dosage--that you would cause them cancer. In fact, even even if they did get cancer, it would still be unlikely that what you gave them caused that cancer.
2) You can't determine what caused cancer. This is what the tobacco industry leaned on for years. You can tell that there is cancer, but you cannot tell what caused the cells to act the way they did. There are statistical studies on risk factors that can point to probabilities, but that's over enormous data sets. For any given individual, no medical investigation could possibly provide evidence of foul play.
To sum it up: a cancer cocktail would have a very small chance (a fraction of one percent) of working, and there would be no way of proving that he was given cancer artificially even if it did work.
To put it another way: if the CIA wanted him dead, they know much more effective means of achieving that. The odds of a cancer attack working would be so small that it would be a complete waste of time and resources to harness the technology and infrastructure within the US and then waste a double agent with access to Chavez's body to carry it out.