Cancer: slow progress

In 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer. He made special requests for additional funds to fight the disease, converted the Army's Fort Detrick, Maryland biological warfare facility into a cancer research centre, and passed the National Cancer Act. But victory over the disease looks as remote a possibility as it did 36 years ago.

Patients' chances of long-term survival in 2004, the latest year for which data are available, were not much better than the first few years of Nixon's war on the disease. The graph shows that the "incredible advances in cancer detection, prevention, and treatment" over the last four decades trumpeted by the US' National Cancer Institute are not accompanied by a huge improvement in cancer survival rates after five years.

The Boston Globe writes that scientists are still unenlightened about cancer: many of the most anticipated new drugs have extended patients' lives by only a few months at great expense, and researchers are still not able to pinpoint a cause for cancer, nor do they understand what makes the disease spread. The slight improvement in the percentage of patients that survive for five years after diagnosis may only reflect earlier detection of the disease and lifestyle changes, rather than dramatic improvements in treatments.

The failure to control metastasis -- the spread of cancer -- is cited as the main reason that the death toll from cancer has not come down dramatically.

• Wider use of screening tests has led to tumors being found earlier, slightly increasing the number of years patients live with cancer, but without an overall extension in their life expectancy.  
• After cancer spreads from its original location, doctors can only delay the disease, not cure it.

Headway has been made in some areas. Breast cancer survival five years after diagnosis is now about 90% in the United States, a jump from 74% in 1979. And bowel cancer survival five years after diagnosis is now 66%, compared with 52% in 1979.

This year, cancer is expected to kill 560,000 people in the United States, putting the disease on a pace to overtake heart disease as the leading cause of death in the country by the year 2010.

The data may put extra focus on the federal funding freeze on cancer research since 2003, which actually translates into a 12% reduction due to inflation, resulting in more research proposals being rejected.