For the curious public, patients, doctors, journalists, and the people who write health policy.
EpiDetective builds free tools that let you explore published health research for yourself.
See which exposures have been linked to which cancers, and how strong the evidence is behind each link. It is built on the IARC Monographs, the World Health Organization's review of what can cause cancer. Start from a cancer, start from an exposure, or open the whole map.
I am Wenxin Wan, a postdoctoral scientist at the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, the World Health Organization's cancer agency.
I did my PhD at Utrecht University's Institute for Risk Assessment Sciences, studying how exposures at work and in the environment affect cancer risk. That work helped establish the causal role of benzene in lung cancer, and was covered by The New York Times.
Day to day I work with large international cohort studies, following hundreds of thousands of people over many years to see which exposures are followed by disease. At IARC I lead the analysis for OPICO, which pools ten such cohorts across three continents to ask whether long-term opioid use carries a cancer risk, and I advise the Lung Cancer Cohort Consortium (LC3) on how evidence about exposures at work can feed into lung cancer screening.
I build these tools because the evidence I work with is public and carefully made, and still almost unreadable unless you already know the field. Closing that gap seemed worth the effort. Everything here is checkable, and the links go to the original sources.