What Cancer Epidemic?

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Statistics on cases of cancer - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

It's a staple of environmentalist dogma that industrial chemicals and pesticides are causing an epidemic of human cancers. Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, for example, declared last year that "Every human being harbors in his or her body about 500 synthetic chemicals that were nonexistent before 1920." Such claims are often accompanied by pleas for new regulations removing even the smallest traces of synthetic chemicals from the environment.

But is there a rising cancer epidemic? Not according to Cancer Facts and Figures 2001, recently issued by the American Cancer Society. "Overall cancer incidence and death rates have continued to decrease in men and women since the early 1990s, and the decline in overall cancer mortality has been greater in recent years, the report concludes. The National Cancer Institute's annual report for 2000 similarly found that "the number of new cancer cases per 100,000 persons per year... for all cancers combined declined on average 0.8 percent per year between 1990 and 1997." According to the institute, the incidence of cancer has declined by 1.3 percent per year since 1992.

A lot of the cancer furor can be traced to the seemingly dramatic increases in breast and prostate cancer during the 1980s. "The apparent increases in the incidence of breast and prostate cancer are mostly due to increased screening," reports Mary Beth Hill-Harmon, an epidemiologist with the American Cancer Society. In other words, doctors got better at detecting breast and prostate cancers earlier, and this artificially--and temporarily--pumped up their numbers. Breast cancer rates have been roughly constant since 1987, and breast cancer death rates dropped 2.2 percent per year from 1990 to 1997. Prostate cancer death rates decreased by 4.4 percent annually from 1994 to...