What Illness Did Christopher Hitchens Have?

Christopher Hitched announced that he was undergoing treatment for oesophageal cancer.

In a Vanity Fair piece titled, Topic of Cancer, he stated that he was undergoing treatment for cancer. He said he recognised the long-term prognosis was far from positive and that he would be lucky to live another five years.

A heavy smoker and drinker since his teenage years, Hitchens acknowledged that these habits likely contributed to his illness.

During his illness, he was under the care of Francis Collins and was the subject of Collins’ new care cancer treatment, which maps out the human genome and selectively targets damaged DNA.

Hitchens later died of pneumonia on December 15, 2011, in the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, aged 62.