As if tortillas weren't already expensive enough because of a ridiculous 2005 enviromental law mandating usage and subsidies for ethanol, now the pesky medical community is in on the take.

Percutaneous ethanol injection (PEI) is an injection of ethanol through the skin directly into a bone tumor to kill cancer cells, which is dangerous enough to picnics all over America due to inflated corn prices, but now it turns out ethanol has value for thyroid cancer patients as well.

"PEI may be a valuable adjunctive or secondary treatment to radioiodine therapy, and it may contribute to better management of thyroid cancer patients with bone metastasis," said Kunihiro Nakada, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Radiology at Hokkaido University Hospital in Japan.

Reports indicate there are about 33,550 new cases of thyroid cancer per year. Traditionally the route is non-food-based surgery followed by thyroid hormone therapy or radioactive iodine.

Not any more. Doctors are jumping on the environmental bandwagon too. Hey, if environmentalists can spend two decades lobbying for ethanol in gasoline it's only fair that doctors get some government porkbarrel as well.

"Our study is a therapeutic approach to treat metastatic bone tumor from thyroid cancer by injecting absolute ethanol directly into the tumor," explained Nakada.

Additional research should be done to optimize treatment, he said, including determining doses of ethanol, number of times PEI sessions should be repeated, how to predict outcome earlier and what other therapeutic options could be better combined with PEI to enhance efficacy.

They don't even know how well it works. But a little grant money will help them find out.

Next up - ethanol solves the mystery of perpetual motion.