Cancer Overtakes Marriage in UK

Here’s some scary statistics from yesterday’s i paper:

Developing cancer is now more common than getting married or having a first baby… Analysis by Macmillan Cancer Support shows there were 361,216 cancers diagnosed in 2014 in the UK compared with 289,841 marriages. Getting cancer is also as common as graduating from university, and more common than a woman having her first baby. There were 271,050 babies born to 1st time mothers in England and Wales in 2015 compared to 319,011 new cases of cancer. The dat showed that during the past decade, more than 1.2 million people have ben diagnosed with cancer under the age of 65. This includes 343,000 people in the UK who were diagnosed with cancer in their 20s 30s or 40s between 2006 and 2015. Nearly 2/3 of cancer diagnoses occur in the over-65s….Projections suggest that around 1/2 of people will develop cancer at some point in their lives.    

And yet cancer is not a single disease. It can range from a small, easily removed lump to an illness that sweeps through a person like wildfire. We all have cancers within us at any time, just as we have all sorts of infectious diseases, and like the latter, they often lie undetected until some other illness or crisis lowers our immune systems and we become ill.     So these figures are not as bad as they seem. But they should be a wake up call to our leaders that so many people are malnourished and living with stress that is allowing this epidemic to emerge.