Factoid:
Cigarette smoking by U.S. high school students rose 32 percent during the 1990s, and cigar smoking has increased 50 percent since 1995, according to the American Cancer Society, fueling fears of higher lung cancer rates in coming years.
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Cancer Rates Are Dropping, Mostly Among Men
Most kinds of cancer are decreasing, but lung cancer among U.S. women actually increased in recent years, according to the American Cancer Society.
Start Date: 4/25/99
An Associated Press story dated April 21, 1999 says that cancer rates are dropping in the United States, largely due to decreased numbers of smokers. Men are seeing more improvement than women. According to the American Cancer Society, although men still get cancer more often than women, the rate of cancer in men is decreasing eight times faster than in women.
Overall, cancer incidence dropped 2.2 percent a year between 1992 and 1996, says the report. Data were not yet available for 1997 forward. Among men, cancer incidence dropped an average of 4.1 percent per year; while for women, it dropped less than half a percent per year. The large gender difference is at least partly related to lung cancer, which has been dropping among men but actually rose among women during the 1990s.
Lung cancer still accounts for the most cancer fatalities. A recent resurgence in teen smoking, and the growing popularity of cigars, could reverse the decline in cancer incidence, experts fear. Cigarette smoking by high school students rose 32 percent during the 1990s; and cigar smoking has increased 50 percent in the last four years, the report says.
Lung cancer aside, the study found improvement in fighting most forms of cancer. But two forms of cancer are increasing: non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and melanoma. New cases of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma are rising by a little over half a percent per year and deaths are rising by 1.8 percent a year. No one knows why. The incidence of melanoma, caused by too much time in the sun, increased 2.7 percent a year during the 1990s, although death rates have remained unchanged.
The number of U.S. women diagnosed with breast cancer has remained steady at about 180,000 per year in recent years, but the death rate for breast cancer victims has been dropping about 2 percent a year.
 Excelsior, Michael Lindemann's new novel (written under the pen name Michael Paul), depicts a wholly plausible near future in which human cloning is both widespread and widely abused; terrorists have access to target-specific biological weapons; recreational space travel is commonplace; and mounting pressures of global climate change, environmental decline, population growth and civil unrest inspire radical new approaches to urban security.
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