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Voice Off: Colon cancer statistics, a Gapminder video with Hans Rosling.
Hans Rosling: Colon cancer statistics shows that the richer a country is, the higher the
risk to get this type of cancer. Look at the graph. The horizontal axis is rich in this
direction, poor in that direction. Each buble is a country, the size is population, and
color is continent. The vertical axis here shows the number of
cases of colon and *** cancer per 100,000 male population. Look, China is here. Russia
is here. United States is here. It means that it just increased the risk. Let me show you
Norway. Norway has quite high occurrence of colon cancer. And, how was it historically?
I'll go backwards in Norway, within 50 years, to 1953. The country had much less cancer,
only 16 cases per 100,000 population. This is what happened, as Norway grows richer
and richer, there were more and more colon cancer and today you can see that the historical
path of Norway fits to the pattern of the whole world.
The only exception is some of the Arab countries in the Mid-East down here. They seem to have
less cancer, over there, but they also grow rich very recently and they need to follow
the cancer statistics for some years to know if it is also going to increase in these countries.
Now, what is the difference between this cancer in men and women? I keep the mark on Norway,
but I change this horizontal axis to be the occurrence of this cancer in women. It's very
similar in men and women, very similar. And this means there is strength in the hypothesis
that it is mainly the diet that causes this. Men and women mostly eat together.
And, it gets more common also for women when the country grows rich. Now, take away Norway
here and I would like, on this vertical axis to show how is the proportion of women dying
from this cancer? And here you can see an interesting pattern is as countries grow richer
more and more are dying until a certain point where it flattens out because even if you
can see it, Australia here has much higher occurrences of this cancer compared to Russia,
but not more women dying from it. This means that the richest countries now
have an ability to screen for colon and *** cancer, to detect it early and to cure around
half of the cases. But it is still a very severe cancer in the world. And, even the
richest countries have not found a way of getting a diet or a lifestyle that protects
against this cancer.