Raising Awareness Without Raising Alarm

This morning on the Laura Ingraham Radio Show, Laura was discussing the news that Tony Snow has had a reappearance of cancer with her guest, Senator John McCain. Taken with last week's story about Elizabeth Edwards and a number of other reports of high profile people battling cancer (both Ingraham and McCain have dealt with cancer as well), it would be easy to conclude that cancer is more prevalent than ever before. In fact, Senator McCain did just that on the air this morning by speculating that "It seems like something is going on" and "Maybe we need to look into why there are all these people with cancer" (I'm very roughly paraphrasing his comments).

But, as Robert Brinner reminds us, "the plural of anecdotes is not data" (at least that pithy remark is usually attributed to him). If you look at the American Cancer Society Statistics for 2007, you'll find that the both the death rate from cancer and the cancer incidence rates have been declining in recent years (at least through 2003-2004, the latest years for which trend data is available).

I pulled three pertinent slides from the ACS statistics presentation, which you can see here.

Obviously, the death and incidence rates are still far too high and there is no doubt about the terrible toll that cancer continues to take despite the many medical advances of recent years. But before we leap to conclusions and start talking about the need to act now, it's important to step back and take a dispassionate look at the numbers that tell the real story.