Men outnumber women for both new cancer cases and for deaths. Although the cancer still has the spectre of a death sentence about it, the death rates for lung, colorectal and certain other cancers are falling. Increasingly, cancer is being viewed within the medical fraternity as more of a chronic, treatable disease like diabetes and heart ailments. Almost weekly, it seems, the news media announces yet another breakthrough in the understanding of what causes cancer or a new development in the war on the disease. And many advocates say cancer can be prevented if we are prepared to change our lifestyles, eat and exercise better and learn to manage stress in today's society.
Cancer is an illness that is at least as old as man.
The ancient Greeks are credited with being the first to recognize cancer as a distinct disease. Carcinoma was coined by the Greeks and is still used today. The oldest possible malignant tumour in a person is in a fossil jawbone discovered by anthropologist Louis Leakey in 1932 in Kenya. It's been suggested the tumour might have been Burkett's lymphoma, a common cancer in east Africa today. Other evidence from Egyptian, Roman and Chinese folklore suggest that cancer has been around for 2000 years.