Say Anything Blog

One thing I get tired of is Breast Cancer Awareness campaigns.  First of all it’s a terrible thing and I wish the disease would go away.  It’s even worse now that I’m hearing of women my age passing away from it. 

But on the other hand who in the world isn’t aware of breast cancer.  Isn’t it the one cancer that you always hear about.  Isn’t it the one cancer where everyone, well every female, is urged to get themselves checked yearly to see if they have that. 

And of course all of those things are good things.  But according to the CDC breast cancer isn’t actually the most prevalent form of cancer, nor is it the cancer that causes the most deaths. 

As you can see, prostrate, which has yet to get it’s own media campaign is actually 27% more prevalent than breast cancer.  More people die from prostrate cancer as well:

Both breast cancer and prostrate cancer have a respectable survival rate which is good news.  Let’s hope we can get both of them to zero.  Prostrate cancer causes slightly more deaths than breast cancer.  It works out to about 7% more die from prostrate than from breast cancer. 

The bad news is that the death rate for both types of cancer is dwarfed by incidences of lung cancer.  Lung cancer kills as many people as both breast and prostrate cancers together.  And we can’t knock the public health programs for trying to “cure” the cancer by making people aware of the dangers of smoking.  It’s even better if they use tobacco taxes as the source of that funding. 

When it comes to funding for cancer research, breast cancer gets the biggest chunk. The National Institute of Health is spending twice the amount of money on breast cancer research than on prostrate cancer research ($705 million compared to $344 million.) 

Doesn’t that show that breast cancer already gets more than its share of attention.  I think it’s time that businesses like the National Football League should drop their little publicity stunts because the awareness is already out there.