I had to de-lurk on this one. I got a similar email through another forward, and it got me riled. Number of problems with this, even if the projection is correct.
#1: Cancer is mostly a disease of the old. People live longer & are much more likely to survive infectious disease, heart disease, stroke, than in 1950s--in short, cancer's much more likely to kill them simply because nothing else got to them first.
#2, diagnostic techniques have become much more sensitive (especially with the prostate specific antigen test), so the rate of *detection* has increased dramatically while death rates have stayed about the same or decreased somewhat for certain types of cancer (non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, eg.)I'm pretty sure that the official scientific consensus is that you can't really tell if more people have cancer now than in the 1950s.
Also--what does "get cancer" mean? Depends on how you define it. Doctors often can't agree on what is early cancer, pre-cancerous, or just weird cell growth. I can't remember if its half or most, but a lot of old men die with pre-cancerous or early-stage-cancer cells in the prostate--but they never knew about it, it didn't cause problems, and its not the cancer that kills them. Do they "have cancer"?
These numbers look like a classic case of factually correct, but terribly misleading.
Kat McGowan