The Associated Press

Published Thursday, June 03, 2004 2:01 PM CDT

WASHINGTON (AP) - Americans' risk of getting and dying from cancer continues to
inch down, says the nation's annual report on the disease. For the first time,
there are signs that lung cancer in women is starting to decline, too.

Not everyone is reaping the gains: Minorities still are more likely than whites
to die from cancer, says the report, published today in the journal Cancer.

Death rates from cancer in general have dropped 1.1 percent a year since 1993,
and today's report confirms that decline continued in 2001. Rates of new cases
are declining about half a percent a year, too.

Most striking in this latest tally is what's happening with the No. 1 cancer
killer: Rates of female lung cancer diagnoses have declined about 2 percent a
year since 1998, years after men began a similar improvement. Also, female death
rates from lung cancer have leveled off, remaining virtually unchanged since
1995, the report says.

"For the first time, we are turning the corner in the lung cancer epidemic in
women," said Ahmedin Jemal of the American Cancer Society, who co-wrote the
report with scientists from the National Cancer Institute, Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and North American Association of Central Cancer
Registries.

"We have been anticipating ... this for a long, long time," Jemal added. "It has
been overdue."

Smoking became common among men long before women, and the resulting lung cancer
consequently struck men sooner.

Lung cancer remains the nation's top-killing malignancy for both sexes, and the
second most common cancer. But it slowly declined among men starting in the
early 1990s as older smokers died and fewer young men took up the habit - a
pattern doctors expect to eventually see in women.


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