Cancer: Shattering the Myth

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To many a modern city dweller who lives under a pall of smog, smokes incessantly, worries about fallout and sprays his flowers with pesticides, possible causes of cancer seem to close in on all sides. "It pleases many to think of cancer as a necessary concomitant of civilization," says Scottish Physician C. S, Muir, "a penalty to be paid for the abandonment of the rustic simplicity of a bygone age, a toll to be exacted for the convenience of the automobile and the pleasures of the cigarette." Even doctors dream of some remote part of Africa or Asia, "where, removed from the madding appurtenances of an alien technology, the inhabitants live out their idyllic, cancer-free lives."

It just isn't so, says Dr. Muir. The real reasons for the apparent scarcity of the disease in underdoctored nations, he reports in Cancer, are: 1) most cases are never recognized; 2) even when recognized, many are not reported; 3) few people in underdeveloped countries live long enough to get the most common forms of cancer.

During long service in Singapore, which has many more doctors and vastly better medical facilities than most Eastern countries (except Japan), Dr. Muir found enough statistics to shatter the myth of a cancer-free Utopia in the Orient. At first glance the island's cancer death rate appears to be about one-third that of the U.S.: 52 per 100,000 every year, as against 150. But Singapore's population is loaded top-heavily in the lowest age brackets: 33% under ten years old, as against 22% in the U.S. and 16% in England. Only 20% of Singapore's inhabitants are aged 40 or over, as against 35% in the U.S. and 45% in England. Dr. Muir is confident that when diagnosis and death reporting are equally accurate in all countries, the plague of cancer will be recognized as worldwide, but with still-provocative differences in the kinds and sites of the most common cancers in different peoples.