Over the past four decades, the global number of people dying from cancer each year has doubled. This can look like the world is losing its battle with cancer: people are more likely to develop it, and we’re getting no better at treating it. This isn’t true.
There are, of course, almost 4 billion more people in the world than in 1980. And many of those people are older. This matters a lot because cancer rates rise steeply with age.
The chart shows three different measures. Total deaths just count how many people died from cancer; this is the number that has doubled. Crude death rates, shown in yellow, adjust for population size; the increase shrinks from more than 100% to around 20%. Age-adjusted rates, shown in blue, also account for the fact that countries have older populations today; we can see that the fully age-adjusted rate has actually fallen by more than 20%.
It means that for the average person, the likelihood of dying from cancer in any given year is now lower than it was for someone of a similar age in the past. The world still has a long way to go in preventing and treating cancer, but it’s wrong to think that no progress has been made.
Where this page came from
This page was imported from Our World in Data. “Global deaths from cancer have increased, but the world has made progress against it” by Hannah Ritchie, published by Our World in Data under CC BY 4.0. Changed here: set as a page, its interactive charts shown as pictures. Data from third parties keeps its own licence.
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Licence: CC BY 4.0 · Adapted from ourworldindata.org
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