May 14, 2007
Number of cancer deaths by type. There was a question at lunch as to why breast cancer gets the biggest hype, including its own month. I thought that it wasn't the number one killer cancer in women. It is actually the third on the list. Download the pdf and scroll down to the table listing the number of deaths by gender and cancer type. Lung cancer and cancer of the digestive system both beat out breast cancer. However, I don't think anyone is going to give colon cancer its own month. What would the color of that month be? Certainly not pink....
valatan: it's not entirely wrong. In the text they state that breast cancer death rates have declined 2% a year from 1990 to 2002 and that is almost entirely due to better/earlier screening. And 2%/year may not sound like much but I learned from a recent PhD defense the depressing truth that if your cancer is not detected early there is very little that modern science can do for you (statistically speaking; digging up the graph).
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I was pretty sure that breast cancer used to be a lot higher on the list than it is today, and thus spawned mammograms, and screening and the like, and it was reduced. Apparently, that's wrong--it was supplanted by a massive uptick in lung cancer.
posted by Valatan at 03:06PM CST on May 14