Epidemic of lung cancer in women (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Epidemic of lung cancer in women
by HELEN RUMBELOW
Source: Times Of London, Friday, 8/27/99

THE increase in lung cancer among European women has reached epidemic
proportions, according to a World Health Organisation report.

A steady rise in deaths from lung cancer was the most worrying health
trend in Europe, according to figures published in The Lancet today. The
number of women developing lung cancer has doubled since 1955, rising from
7 per 100,000 to 14 per 100,000. It has been increasing most quickly in
the past ten years with the rise in women smoking.

There has been a small decline in the number of men dying from the disease
- to 50 per 100,000 - but the rate of women dying from it has increased to
9.6 per 100,000.

Women are now less likely to die from other major cancers. Fatalities from
breast, intestine and ovarian cancer as well as leukaemia are all on the
decline.

For men, prostate cancer was the only major cancer to be increasing.

"Apart from the steadily rising lung cancer epidemic in women, these
figures provide further evidence of a moderately encouraging pattern in
recent trends in mortality from major cancers in the European Union," said
the report.