Could've been cosmic rays for all we know. Risk factors just don't work like that. They're a real collective cost that must be taken seriously, but deaths are often hard to individually attribute. That sort of threat is far more difficult for people to understand.
If someone smokes a pack a day for 5 decades and gets lung cancer, we don't say "well, it might've been a cosmic ray..." That's technically the truth, but it's not how we evaluate risk. We can be pretty certain that the lung cancer was from smoking, and not a cosmic ray or one month of junk food 20 years prior.
I'm not an oncologist, but Im certain that decades of alcohol abuse is far more likely to cause cancer than a month of mcdonalds. If it was a cancer strongly associated with alcohol use, like esophageal or liver, then it wouldn't be very different from the smoking example above
Could've been the alcohol
Could've been cosmic rays for all we know. Risk factors just don't work like that. They're a real collective cost that must be taken seriously, but deaths are often hard to individually attribute. That sort of threat is far more difficult for people to understand.
If someone smokes a pack a day for 5 decades and gets lung cancer, we don't say "well, it might've been a cosmic ray..." That's technically the truth, but it's not how we evaluate risk. We can be pretty certain that the lung cancer was from smoking, and not a cosmic ray or one month of junk food 20 years prior.
I'm not an oncologist, but Im certain that decades of alcohol abuse is far more likely to cause cancer than a month of mcdonalds. If it was a cancer strongly associated with alcohol use, like esophageal or liver, then it wouldn't be very different from the smoking example above