How Biden cancer diagnosis could have gone undetected
WASHINGTON - Joe Biden's diagnosis with an aggressive form of prostate cancer has spurred some prominent conservatives to accuse the former president of a cover-up, but oncologists told AFP that screening limitations could very well have left his condition undetected until now.
The 82-year-old received the diagnosis last week after he experienced urinary issues and a prostate nodule was found, his office said Sunday.
While President Donald Trump said he was "saddened" to learn of his rival's condition, a chorus of Republicans led by Vice President JD Vance and Donald Trump Jr said or shared conspiratorial posts to the effect that Biden and his White House medical team had long concealed his illness for political purposes.
Questions over Biden's health dogged him throughout the waning months of his presidency and his short-lived reelection campaign. And they have been renewed in recent weeks ahead of the expected release of a book detailing what it calls his declining physical condition.
Prostate cancer, the most common among men, is typically diagnosed much sooner than other kinds of cancer. It can be caught in its early stages using blood tests that measure for a protein called PSA.
Medical experts interviewed by AFP said the late identification of an advanced cancer would not be unheard of, even for a former president receiving top-of-the-line medical care.
"We can't rule out the possibility that it was an aggressive form that developed quickly," said Natacha Naoun, an oncologist with France's Gustave-Roussy Institute.
Annual PSA screening after the age of 70 is not universally recommended.
The US Preventive Services Task Force advises against it, reasoning that the risk of false positives and the harms from biopsies and treatment outweigh the benefits.
"It could be they decided to stop checking PSA annually, and then he had urinary symptoms," said Russell Pachynski, an oncologist with Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, who told AFP that prostate cancer patients do not always experience telltale pains or signs.
It is also possible that Biden was undergoing routine screenings, but that those checks failed to turn up indications of cancer, Pachynski said.
"Maybe it was just unlucky that his particular cancer didn't express a lot of PSA and he still had a normal PSA. In that setting, you would not go checking the prostate or do a biopsy, etc., unless it was driven by symptoms."
Otis Brawley, an oncologist and epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University, said studies have shown both PSA testing and rectal exams are imperfect.
"It is not unusual for a man to be diagnosed with metastatic prostate disease despite normal annual screening," he told AFP. "This is part of the limitations of prostate screening."
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The Citizen
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- The Citizen
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The battle on antisemitism: Fighting prejudice with prejudice
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Incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism and assaults have risen significantly since Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people and kidnapping more than 200. Hatred was already on the rise before that deadly day, but it spiked dramatically afterward. The war in Gaza, with Israel's stated aim being to destroy Hamas, gave rise to widespread death and suffering among Palestinians. More than 54,000 people have died, about a third of them children under 18, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for high-ranking members of both Hamas and the Israeli government, charging that they have committed crimes against humanity. So much suffering stirred protests, most notably on college campuses, where students constructed tent encampments and barricaded themselves inside buildings. 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There's rarely a straight line between words uttered in one part of the culture and actions taken in another. A single deadly gesture typically springs from a perfect storm of fact and fiction, outrage and desperation, single-mindedness and isolation, mental illness and toxic social media where everything is written in all-caps and there's no space for complications. But this much is clear: Deporting immigrants, whether documented or undocumented, hasn't erased antisemitism. Silencing foreign students raising their voices against Israeli or American foreign policy hasn't made Jewish men and women safer on city streets. Putting ivy-covered institutions in the crosshairs of politicians doesn't seem to be helping either. Incidents of antisemitism have continued to grow since 2023's dramatic spike. Prejudice is one of many fine fertilizers. And the White House has insured that an abundance of it is raining down. Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, Givhan has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press.
