M.D. With over 900,000 new cases and 450,000 deaths last year in the United States alone, cancer has now reached epidemic proportions.
Cancer strikes one in three people and kills one in four.
It is now the only major killing disease in the industrialized world whose rate are sharply rising. Analysis of overall cancer rates standardized for age, sex and ethnicity, has demonstrated steady increases since the 1930s, with more recent sharp annual increases in incidence rates by some 2 percent and in mortality rates by some 1 percent. Striking confirmation of these recent increases comes from estimates of the lifetime probability of getting cancer for people born at different times. For white males born between 1975 to 1985 for instance, the probability of developing cancer has risen from 30 to 36 percent and from 19 to 23 percent for dying from cancer. Lung cancer is responsible for about one-third of the overall recent increase in incidence rates.