The Politics of Cancer

More than a thousand people die of cancer every day in the United States. For every American alive today, one in three will contract the disease; one in five will die from it. Cancer is the plague of the twentieth century, second only to heart disease as a cause of death in most industrial nations. Although most other diseases are on the decline, cancer is on the rise. The trend has been building for some time: Roswell Park, a New York physician, noted as early as 1899 that cancer was “now the only disease which is steadily upon the increase.” That year, cancer claimed about 30,000 U.S. lives. In 1994, cancer will kill more than fifteen times that many: 538,000 according to American Cancer Society projections. If present tren...