Quote: (02-01-2015 10:03 PM)Impulse Wrote:
Stuff
While I agree that breast cancer definitely gets more than its fair share of screen time, and I think that raising "awareness" at this point is pretty stupid (who the fuck hasn't heard of breast cancer?), you're ignoring the incidence rates. I'm going to use my numbers (I haven't verified the accuracy of your numbers, I think they're wrong, so please post a source. A basic search of the SEER database shows vastly different numbers for colon cancer and breast cancer, as well as the others). I will thus be using the SEER database numbers. However, even if I were to use your numbers, the below would be true:
If 12.3% of women get breast cancer, and the 5-year survival rate is 89.2%, that means 1.32% of women will die from breast cancer. Since women are ~50% of the population, this implies 0.66% of the population will die of breast cancer. That's pretty serious, especially since we're not even talking about the struggles of the majority (cancer patients/survivors) who get it. Breast cancer is the second most diagnosed form of cancer.
Prostate cancer is immensely treatable. It has a 5-year survival rate of 98.9%.
Now let's look at colon cancer. It's a shitty goddamn disease, no doubt about it. For diagnostic reasons, it's rarely detected/detectable (unlike breast cancer which can oftentimes be felt) and early symptoms aren't very specific to colon cancer, so it's often caught at much later stages and thus is much more deadly. 4.7% of men and women will acquire colon cancer in their lifetime, and at a 5-year survival rate of 64.7%, 1.7% of people will die from colon cancer. Higher than the percentage of breast cancer, but with a lower incidence. Colon cancer is probably ripe to be targeted for a diagnostic campaign next. I imagine regular colonoscopies will be suggested to catch this disease earlier.
Not sure where you got your melanoma statistic but melanoma is known to be easily treated/treatable in most cases and is usually quite easy to detect. With 91.3% 5-year overall survival, and only 2.1% of the population getting it, this shouldn't be on the chart.
Endometrial cancer has a 81.5% 5-year overall survival rate and a 2.7% incidence rate in women, meaning 0.50% of women or 0.25% of the population will die from it.
Basically, I'm just saying that because breast cancer is so common, it's statistically dubious to only look at survival rates. The number of patients who die from each cancer per year, which reflects both incidence rate and survival rate, is a much better statistic to use when "ranking" cancer in terms of its importance. The below chart seems to suggest that lung cancer deserves the most attention, with colon cancer a second and breast third. Given that the incidence and severity of both lung and colon cancer is greatly affected by smoking cigarettes, if our goal is to "raise awareness" more and prevent as many cancer cases/deaths as possible, the current campaigning to prevent smoking should be amplified. But breast cancer still deserves focus.