That we're all at risk of dying from cancer is a good thing. No, really, I insist that this is true.
For what it is really saying is that we're all living long enough to die of cancer.
We're not, instead, dying young of infectious diseases, starvation, and war.
OK, fair enough, that's of small comfort to someone who has just received a cancer diagnosis. It's grossly unfair to those few who get struck down young.
From personal experience, a friend died of brain cancer at 16 years of age. My father, when announcing his own diagnosis at age 85, emailed us all to say: “I have lived long enough to get prostate cancer.”
Cancer is, barring those youthful tragedies, a disease of age and a life largely already lived. This may or may not be a comfort, but it's definitely a change.
This is the thing we need to keep in mind when we discuss things like the World Cancer Congress.
Yes, it is absolutely true that more of us die now of -- or even more of us will die of -- cancer than ever used to happen in the past.
But that's because in the past, most of us would already be dead.
We see some of the toll of those infectious diseases in the reports of the measles outbreak that has been occurring in Bangladesh. Hundreds dead. That's hundreds of individual tragedies. But it's worth reminding ourselves what it was like not so long ago.
Even in the richest countries two and three centuries back, it was expected that half of all children would die before puberty. About half of those -- so a quarter of all babies -- in that first and most delicate year of life. Then another half -- another quarter of all children -- from accidents and infections.
We would assume that a grieving parent today would have been most unlucky. Back then it was normal for this to happen several times in each family.
Once through those childhood diseases, lifespans were not too far off our own. Someone who reached 20 years of age could well expect to reach 60, for example. Probably the most dangerous thing was childbirth for women. Or war, of course.
What changed things was, in order, drains and drinkable water, followed by better nutrition, and only after that, the antibiotics and vaccines that deal with the infectious diseases themselves.
This is still ongoing, new vaccines arrive all the time. The HPV one has been around a bit more than a decade and already in the UK, cervical cancer among the under-30s has fallen to an effective zero.
It's possible to have great hope for the ongoing trials of mRNA vaccines -- the original intention was always for anti-cancer treatments. Covid was just a happenstance.
But the thing to grasp about high cancer rates in modern populations is that this isn't a result of modern life poisoning us and it's not even, despite what some will claim, because of our diet or exercise regimes. It's because, by any historical standard, we're rich these days.
You know that saying that the rich also have their problems? This is one of them, living long enough to get cancer.
We'd still like to beat cancer, sure we would. But that this is the problem we're worrying about now is evidence of how far we've already come.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
