Making Headway Against Cancer; September 1996; Scientific American Magazine; by Rennie, Rusting; 3 Page(s)

When President Richard M. Nixon signed the National Cancer Act two days before Christmas in 1971, he committed the U.S. to a "war" on cancer. In the 25 years since then, the battle has been waged around the world in laboratories, in hospitals, in our own homes and bodies. All of us are deluged with reports of scientific progress--dispatches from the front, so to speak--recounting incremental discoveries here, larger ones there, and widely hailed "breakthroughs" that translate into practice with frustrating rarity. Warnings about carcinogenic hazards blare one week, then get replaced by new advice that sometimes seems to conflict with what has already been said. What, in fact, has medical science learned about cancer in the past quarter century? What real weapons do we now have for battling this foe, and what do all the miscellaneous discoveries mean for a worried public? There is no way to skirt the fact that the combined death rate for all cancers has yet to come down. Indeed, between 1973 and 1992, the latest year for which comprehensive data are available, the cancer death rate rose by 6.3 percent. (This rate is measured as the number of people dying per 100,000 in the population and is ¿ageadjusted¿-- a maneuver that corrects for progress against other diseases and the rising longevity of the population.) African-Americans and people older than 65 years have fared particularly poorly; in both groups the overall death rate jumped by about 16 percent.

Epidemiologists project that this year nearly 555,000 U.S. cancer patients will die-- up from 331,000 deaths in 1970. Some 40 percent of Americans will eventually be stricken with the disease, and more than one in five will die of it; the trends are broadly similar for most developed nations. Globally, the World Health Organization estimates that cancer kills roughly six million people annually.