Lung cancer policy Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4500 words

Lung cancer policy - Term Paper Example Compared with a combination of other malignant cancers like colon cancer, breast cancer, and the more familiar prostate cancer, the cancer of lungs kills more people than the three mentioned cancers combined. Such is the deadly and alarming situation of cancer of the lung. The simple explanation behind this is that, prostate cancer is prone to men only, while breast cancer is more prone to women. That is a contrast with lung cancer, the malignancy is not specific to gender, and it cuts across both women and men, hence creating more deaths than other types of cancers. In the entire of the nation, by the year 2007 there were roughly around 400,000 people who had survived through lung cancer. This malignancy has the lowest rates of survival compared to breast or prostate cancer which have slightly higher rates of survival. Hence since survival from the cancer is a matter of rarity, this has always resulted to lack of enough funding and even less motivation in creating awareness to the cancer. Currently in the United States the probability of developing cancer in any person’s life is such that 1 man in every 13 men will normally be diagnosed in your life time. And every 1 woman in every 16 women will be diagnosed over the same period. Research on the spending on the lung cancer carried out in 2004 show that the United States has been spending 9.6 billion dollars per year in the treatment and diagnosis of lung cancer. In men, the malignancy diagnosis of the cancer is high among the black and white men compared to Hispanic Asian or Pacific Islander men. In women there is higher statistics in white women contrary to other racial groups. When it comes to survival basing on the same ethnic or racial groups the data is as illustrated below in table 1.2, this is an overall average 5- year survival rate-: In diagnostics over half of the diagnosis normally happens when the cancer is at advanced stages, only 16% of the diagnosis happens at earlier stages. 25% of