Cancer is a nasty word that all of us would never want to get one day. Neither would we want to wish it on anyone.
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It is a very depressing and sobering thought to either have cancer or know of a close friend/family member who has cancer.
We rejoice with them, though, when the medical tests show that their cancer is in remission.
They have defeated cancer, we may think. After all the chemo/radio/whatever therapies that the doctors have recommended, and the undesirable side effects that come with it, it feels like a victory of sorts.
But what does a cancer “in remission” actually mean?
The concept of a detection limit
When I was doing my Masters in environmental engineering, I looked at trace micropollutants and their treatment in wastewater prior to discharge.
These micropollutants are small molecules, and their concentrations in wastewater have to be carefully regulated, because they could cause undesirable damage to the environment — especially if too much of it were to be released to the environment.
We looked at these micropollutants in terms of their concentration in water, and how low we could bring these concentrations to during our filtration operations.
We were looking at concentrations to the order of parts per million (ppm) or parts per billion (ppb).
Imagine you have a million dollars in $1 bills, and you are to find a specific dollar bill out of that million bills. That specific bill is 1 part per million.
Naima
Imagine you have a billion dollars in $1 bills, and you are to find a specific bill out of that billion bills. That’s what we’re looking at as 1 part per billion.
Simply put, in terms of the micropollutant molecules, we’d be looking at 1 molecule out of every million molecules that we’re screening (the other 999,999 molecules being water).
