The mortality rate of smallpox has remained stagnant for decades. I guess that means we’re losing that war as well.
The OP seems to consistently ignore any information that doesn’t support his rather bizarre views on modern medicine and disease.
The only reason my wife survived her first round of cancer in 1996 was due to treatments that didn’t exist in 1990 when the same disease killed her best friend.
The only reason my wife survived her second round of cancer in 2008 was due to treatments that didn’t exist in 1996.
The only reason my wife is currently surviving her third round of cancer today is due to treatments that didn’t exist in 2008.
So from my POV, the enemy is being pushed back at a pretty good clip. Not as fast or as well as we’d all hope, but there has been massive progress in treating some cancers (such as hers), and some progress in treating almost all cancers.
And even for the ones we presently have little treatment for, we now have a much better understanding of the disease process than we did. Which places us closer to a treatment. It’s unknowable how far in the future that may be, but it’s less far than it would have been had we not gained that knowledge.
Meantime we have also made great strides in managing the process of dying from untreatable types or from situations that are just too far gone. The outcome remains the same, just as it does for all humans, but the last stage of the journey can be a hell of a lot better now than it was 20 or 40 years ago.
Sometimes in the course of life you have to look very, very hard to find the bright spot, but it’s always there if you look hard enough and maybe squint a bit.
sweat209, I’d like to suggest that you cut down on the number of posts you make and the number of websites you read (some of which are nutcase websites) and instead read some books on cancer. You should read nonfiction ones about cancer, not fiction, although the fiction might teach you things too. Apparently one that’s much recommended is The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Can someone else recommend some books which are fairly new and useful for nonprofessionals in learning about cancer?
Incidentally, are you a native English speaker? You seem to have problems with grammar. Perhaps you should take a course on English composition.
And, just in case anyone’s interested. . . an earlier thread.
For one recent major victory, consider cervical cancer. It’s usually caused by a virus (strictly speaking, by one of a few different viruses), and we now have a vaccine against that virus. As a result, cervical cancer rates have plummeted. No, that doesn’t help much with most other cancers, but that’s the way a war is fought, one battle at a time.
I’m not trying to say in this thread why is cancer cure so slow.I’m trying to understand members explaining in other threads that cancer has made progress. I’m trying to understand that.
That thread is all over the place and not coherent reading. I seem to not understand members explaining in other threads that cancer has made progress.
That is what I’m having hard time understating.I think if members posted the 5 or 10 year survival rate of the 80’s than new 5 or 10 year survival rate of 2014 I would understand it better.
I’ve given you a link that has exactly that information twice now. If you aren’t willing to read that why should I bother doing it again?
I’m looking for some thing more like this http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Yn1crn6Gpak/T476j27qtQI/AAAAAAAAAz4/NhkYXSVFGBs/s1600/Survival+Rate+by+Cancer+Type.png
I think chart like this all different cancers showing over time will help me understand the progress.
The links I’ve posted have all the same information, broken down by specific types of cancer. If you can’t be bothered to do a little research on your own I’m not going to do the work for you.
Then may I suggest the next time you wonder about something you post that as your question. For instance “How have the 5/10 year survival rate changed since 1980?” I
instead of “Is the war on cancer an utter failure? In the past 15 to 20 years have there been any progress ( or just little bit) ? Is there any new stuff in lab shown promising results.”
Of course, X year survival rates don’t tell the whole story, either. Something like the HPV vaccine I mentioned above wouldn’t show up at all in that, since it prevents people from getting the disease in the first place.
You posted this http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-info/cancerstats/types/breast/survival/breast-cancer-survival-statistics#Trends
But that only talks about : Breast cancer gone from 52% to 85% from 1971 to 2009.
And Testicular Cancer 1971 it was 82% and 2009 98%
This web sites just gives number this many new cases and this many deaths.
http://www.cancer.org/research/cancerfactsstatistics/cancerfactsfigures2014/
Just curious, before you opened this thread did you review the thread you opened last year which was entitled, “Is the war on cancer an ‘utter failure’?: …”.
Maybe we should tell him that the key to the War on Cancer has always been Elm Street. The Greeks knew it. The Carthaginians knew it. Now he knows it, too.
IMHO this is where the major victories have been. Less lung cancer incidence and mortality not so much because treatment is so much better but because less smoking means less lung cancer.
Colorectal cancerincidence and mortality significantly decreasing because those colonoscopies we all get remove precancerous things before they get to points that they need other treatment.
In terms of cancer deaths in the U.S. lung is still number one, followed by colorectal and breast cancers, so the documented progress in decreasing the absolute numbers of deaths in those cancers is a big deal. Preventing or developing an effective treatment for pancreatic cancer would be a very big deal as it is right behind breast cancer in deaths.
Cervical cancer (and penile, anal, and various head and neck cancers) will be dropping significantly as HPV infecion decreases as a result of the immunization mentioned above.
Cancer incidence overall increases as people live long enough to get it. To a very large degree cancer is a function of aging. The fact that despite that cancer deaths per 100K have decreased fairly steadily since the 80s - from about 210/100K to under 170/100K - is remarkable.
I defer to others who know much more about cancer treatment than I do to figure out apples to apples comparison (identifying more at earlier stages? labelling conditions as cancer that were unlikely to have progressed to fatalities? true progress?) but identifying what causes cancers and preventing them in the first place seems to be where the low hanging fruit is.
Glad you’re here, because I have a sensible question: how much has the advancement of detection methods led to an apparent increase in incidence?
And that could have an effect on the apparent effectiveness of treatment. Maybe in the bad old days, only the biggest and baddest cancer was typically diagnosed. Now, better detection methods allow us to identify small, easy-to-treat cancers that would not have been noticed in, say, 1970. It’s sort of like fighting widespread crime by arresting and convicting more jaywalkers - yes you can say that we are making more arrests per capita nowadays, but are the streets really that much safer with all those muggers and rapists who aren’t getting arrested?
In this case, yes, because those little easy-to-treat cancers would have gone on to be big, hard-to-treat cancers if they hadn’t been caught early.