{"id":1630,"date":"2011-02-07T20:54:22","date_gmt":"2011-02-07T20:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=1630"},"modified":"2011-02-07T20:54:22","modified_gmt":"2011-02-07T20:54:22","slug":"does-breast-cancer-get-too-much-attention","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=1630","title":{"rendered":"Does Breast Cancer Get Too Much Attention ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes it seems like breast cancer gets a little too much publicity in comparison to other cancers.; it seems that breast cancer gets 10 mentions in the media to every mention of prostate cancer; not to mention lung cancer which causes more deaths in women than breast cancer.<\/p>\n

I’ll be using figures from Cancer Research UK<\/a> to make the points throughout this posting …<\/p>\n

First of all lets get the big figures out of the way. In 2008, breast cancer killed 12,047 women (and 69 men) in comparison to total deaths from cancer of\u00a0156,723 – “only” 7%; even excluding cancer deaths for men, breast cancer claimed 16% of all cancer deaths for women.<\/p>\n

Lung cancer is the one that claims the most lives – 22% of all cancer deaths are from lung cancer, but we can ignore them because it’s the fault of those smokers. Although according to the Wikipedia<\/a> article on lung cancer between 10-15% of all deaths from lung cancer are from non-smokers – probably all passive smokers.<\/p>\n

After the two big cancers, we get prostate cancer which claimed the lives of 10,168 men, or 6,5% of all cancer deaths – not much behind the levels of breast cancer And just for those who aren’t paying attention, no there were no deaths amongst women from prostate cancer.<\/p>\n

Including all deaths from gender specific cancers (and I’ll cheat and include the breast cancer figures for both men and women), male specific cancers account for 6.65% of all cancer deaths, and female specific cancers count for 12.5% of all cancer deaths. That is quite a significant difference, and significantly more than the figure of 7% for breast cancer deaths amongst women.<\/p>\n

If you look at cancer as a whole, 52% of all cancer deaths were men, and 48% women. It’s relatively even despite<\/em> the increased risk women run of dying from a female specific cancer. Of all non gender specific cancers, men had a higher number of deaths in 22 out of 27 different cancer categories.<\/p>\n

So let us have a look at the figures from the media. Specifically counting the search results from the BBC News website :-<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Search Phrase<\/th>\nNumber of results<\/th>\nPercentage of mentions<\/th>\nPercentage of deaths<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n
“Cancer”<\/td>\n14401<\/td>\n100%<\/td>\n100%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
“Breast Cancer”<\/td>\n2206<\/td>\n15%<\/td>\n7%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
“Prostate cancer”<\/td>\n606<\/td>\n4.2%<\/td>\n6.5%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
“Lung Cancer”<\/td>\n758<\/td>\n5.2%<\/td>\n22%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
“Rectal Cancer”<\/td>\n40<\/td>\n2.7%<\/td>\n10.4%<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

I think it’s more than obvious that breast cancer gets a little more attention than the others. That’s not to say it gets too much attention – it’s the others that get too little.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes it seems like breast cancer gets a little too much publicity in comparison to other cancers.; it seems that breast cancer gets 10 mentions in the media to every mention of prostate cancer; not to mention lung cancer which causes more deaths in women than breast cancer. I’ll be using figures from Cancer Research […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[12,3],"tags":[809,807,808,810],"class_list":["post-1630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","tag-breast","tag-cancer","tag-prostate","tag-rectal","category-12-id","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-qi","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1630"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1641,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1630\/revisions\/1641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}