>>> Jim heartfield <jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk> 01/24 11:21 AM >>>
In message <Pine.GSO.4.02.9901231545000.11742-100000 at chuma.cas.usf.edu>,
Frances Bolton (PHI) <fbolton at chuma.cas.usf.edu> writes
>On Sat, 23 Jan 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>> >some point in their lives, not necessarily in the calendar year 1999. And
>> >the figures are correct, and will almost certainly continue to rise in the
>> >foreseeable future -- they have been rising steadily in the postwar period.
>>
>> Has the figure been rising because of our longer life expectancy?
>>
>Rising prostate cancer rates are partially a result of longer life
>expectancy. Don't know about other kinds.
I would have thought that the rise in cancer rates is precisely the changing profile of disease that comes with longer life expectancy. Many cancers, like breast cancer, prostrate cancer, are associated with what, to our ancestors, would have looked like old age.
It is an irony of medicine that the diminution of such killers as influenza (though I was shocked to here that 3000 died from this in Britain this winter), TB and so on, leads to a greater preponderance of deaths from heart disease, cancer and so on. I guess the facts are that you can push the boundaries of mortality back, but you cannot abolish them.
The reading of this changing profile of fatal disease that the rise in deaths from cancer need some kind of mechanical explanation, or worse still that this is some kind of new menace is perverse. A billboard here reads 'Britain's greatest killer is lurking in your chest'. It is about heart disease. But consider the mad interpretation that the heart is a killer. In fact it is the heart that gives you life. This is a problem of pessimism that sees the glass half empty, when really it's half-full. -- Jim heartfield