A New Strategy for the War on Cancer - 8
Within twelve months from the date you are reading this, over 1.4 million Americans will be newly diagnosed with cancer. As you read this, approximately 12 million people are being treated or monitored for cancer in the U.S. Of those, about 560,000 will die within the next year. Forty percent of all cancer victims ultimately lose the battle and die. Each day, over 3800 of us Americans enter the battle field of cancer. Each day, over 1500 people die on that battle field. That is the equivalent of six fully loaded 767 jumbo airliners crashing each day killing everyone on board. Six jumbo jet crashes a day! Expanding our view, we find that, according to the World Health Organization, about 12.3 million people worldwide will develop cancer this year. Of those, 7.6 million will die from the disease—more than 20,000 each day. Globally, 62% of those with cancer will die from the disease compared to 40% in America.
The annual rate of death from cancer in the United States in 1971 was 199 per 100,000. The most recent statistics (2006), show that the rate changed only slightly in 35 years—181 per 100,000. That is a decrease of only 9 percent over the last 35 years of available record. Granted, we have seen a somewhat larger decrease since the rate peaked in the early 1990s, but the trend still shows relatively little progress over the four decades. I use the 1971 baseline, because that is when President Richard Nixon officially declared war on cancer as I will discuss shortly.
In over a third-of-a-century following the declaration of war on cancer, American taxpayers have deposited over $70 billion in the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the fight against the disease. This investment, however, pales in the light of what has been spent by drug companies, educational institutions, charities, and other government agencies. All totaled, Americans have spent, through taxes, donations, and private research and development, over $200 billion, inflation-adjusted, to wage this war since 1971. Yet, all that money and effort over all those years have reduced deaths from cancer by only 9 percent. Another statistic that has to be considered is the actual number of deaths from cancer. Because of our country’s population growth each year, even with the small downward trend in the cancer mortality rate (deaths per 100,000), the total number of deaths from the disease has maintained an upward trend. When the 2004 data was released by the NCI in 2007, the cancer fighting organizations raved about how the declining mortality rate over the past decade had produced actual decreases in the total number of cancer deaths two years in a row. In other words, this death rate had declined more than the accompanying population rate had increased. Although the death rate declined slightly again in 2005, the actual number of cancer deaths increased again from 2004 to 2005 according to according to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). So, with few exceptions, total cancer deaths continue to rise each year.