Image by Getty Images via @daylife

There’s endless debate in the blogosphere about whether Apple should disclose more details about Steve Jobs’ illness. I think the whole debate is silly because statistics for this type of rare cancer are  limited, and are likely to be of poor predictive value for an individual.  The Apple honcho has advanced cancer. The symptoms require him to take medical leave. What more do people need to know?

Amidst all the doom and gloom, here’s some good news for Steve Jobs: treatment for the type of cancer he has is improving rapidly. it is a rare type of cancer called pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor that afflicts the hormone producing islet cells in the pancreas. there have been precious few treatments–until now.

“This is a field where major advances are being made,” says M.D. Anderson Cancer Center oncologist James Yao. “The options [for patients] are increasing.”

Two new targeted drugs can dramatically slow the growth of the disease, according to trials presented this year.  Both are used now for kidney cancer, but have shown powerful promise in delaying the growth of nasty neuroendocrine tumors.

Novartis’ drug Afinitor more than doubled the time neuroendocrine patients survived without the disease progressing, to 11 months from 4.6 months, according to results of a big trial presented by Dr. Yao in Barcelona this summer. The effect was highly statistically significant. The drug works by hitting a key growth-promoting node involved in cell growth called mTOR that may go out of control in neuroendocrine cancers. Novartis is applying for regulatory approval based on the result.

A second drug that has shown similar promising results is Pfizer’s Sutent kidney cancer drug. Pfizer recently snagged European approval for the drug in treating the pancreatic tumors and said it was applying for U.S. approval.

What about getting a liver transplant as a treatment for neuroendocrine tumor that has spread, as Mr. Jobs appears to have had?  it is nonstandard treatment, says Dr. Yao, and there are not reliable statistics on how well it works. Yet what little data we have indicate that the odds of long term survival after such a  transplant are substantial.

For what it is worth, recently published German study looked at 69 such patients who had received liver transplants as treatments for advanced pancreatic neuroendorine tumors. 44% survived five years, and and even better 60% of patients who were younger and had other favorable prognostic factors survived five years. Like all cancer survival statistics, these numbers are historical and backwards looking. The odds may very well have improved since then.

That’s not to say Mr. Jobs doesn’t have a very serious disease. He does. The good news for him is that prospects for patients like him are on the upswing.

some afflictions can be an eye-opener. Photograph: Getty Images

“Can Chlamydial Conjunctivitis Result from Direct Ejaculation Into the Eye?” ask Simon Rackstraw, ND Viswalingam and Beng T Goh of the Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. That question forms the title of a study they published in 2007 in the International Journal of STD and Aids. Drs Rackstraw, Viswalingam and Goh describe the plights of four patients, and disclose the detective work involved in diagnosing and treating them.

Conjunctivitis, whether caused by the sexually-transmitted disease chlamydia or by some other irritant, also goes by the name “pink eye”. It’s a catch-all description for inflammation of the conjunctiva, the membranes that line the eyelid and the surface of the eye.

The doctors finger the bacterium chlamydia trachomatis as the likely culprit in as many as 9% of the severe conjunctivitis cases seen by casualty departments. they imply that most doctors would blindly – and perhaps wrongly – assume that manual transmission was involved: that patients had rubbed their own eyes with their own hands after those hands had come in contact with infected fluids, either their own or those of a partner.

The mechanical aspect of their tales had a dull sameness. One patient said that “symptoms in her right eye started a week following sexual intercourse with a known male partner who had ejaculated into the eye”. another, a man, “had a casual encounter four months previously and recalled this partner ejaculating into his eye during oral sex”.

The Sherlock-Holmesian big clue, the study relates, was that “none of the patients were found to have chlamydia detected within the genital tract on testing, but all gave a history of a recent sexual partner having ejaculated into the affected eye”.

But the story remains incomplete, because “unfortunately, in these cases we were unable to test the sexual partners to see if they had chlamydia”.

The doctors reached a sort of conclusion, undoubtedly meant to guide the thoughts of any medical personnel who might have limited understanding as to the ways one can contract conjunctivitis. “It is likely”, they write, “that this mode of transmission is underestimated, as a history of ejaculation into the conjunctiva is not normally asked for.”

(Thanks to Ivan Schwab and Maarten Keulemans for bringing this to my attention.)

• Marc Abrahams is editor of the bimonthly Annals of Improbable Research and organiser of the Ig Nobel prize