More individuals are getting cancer today.
Although it's true that cases of cancer are rising slightly, that doesn't mean your risk of getting the disease is higher than in the past. In fact, the chances of being diagnosed with and dying from cancer have been declining since the early 1990s.
Cancer risk increases with age, and people today are living longer, which drives up the total number of cancer cases. Moreover, the aging of the Baby Boom population is producing an unusually large pool of potential cancer patients now and for the next several decades. These facts don't translate, though, into a greater overall cancer incidence.
Another factor: More cancers are being detected — and earlier — thanks to increased use of screening tests such as mammograms, PSA (prostate-specific antigen, which detects prostate cancer), and colonoscopies for early colon cancer. However, some of the tumors detected by screening would never have become dangerous, so to some extent the rise in cases is an inflated figure.
Although an estimated 1.37 million new cancer cases will be diagnosed in the United States this year (excluding some skin cancers), and 563,700 Americans will die of the disease, cancer mortality actually has been declining for several years in most categories.
Still, the incidence of cancer is growing within some groups. Brain tumor rates are climbing among children for unknown reasons. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in adults is rising, and more women today are developing and dying from lung cancer (the incidence in men has dropped). In addition, occurrence and deaths for some cancers in minority populations, particularly African Americans, continue to exceed their counterparts in the white population — largely, it is believed, because of unequal access to healthy environments and medical care.
Drug companies, the government, and/or the 'cancer establishment' are blocking new treatments.
It may seem that new treatments are approved at an agonizingly slow pace, but that's in part because the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)'s job is to prevent unsafe or ineffective drugs from being sold in this country. The agency has strict scientific hurdles that a proposed new drug must clear before being approved for wide use. Even if a new treatment appears to work in a few patients or is considered a "magic bullet" for cancer, it will be barred unless sound scientific measures can establish its value.
On the flip side, the FDA has given rapid approval to many new cancer agents in the last few years, among them Gleevec™ for chronic myeloid leukemia and gastrointestinal stromal tumor, and Velcade® for multiple myeloma, a blood disease.
Everyone in the "cancer establishment" and their families and friends are as prone to cancer as are their patients. They are as eager as anyone else for new and better treatments to become available.
