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Voice Off: Lung Cancer Statistics, a Gapminder video with Hans Rosling.
Hans Rosling: Let me show you the gender differences in lung cancer in the world. Look at this
graph. Every bubble is a country. The size is the population. The color is the continent
from where the country is situated. You can see up in the map here, in the corner. The vertical axis shows the number of new cases of lung
cancer per 100000 men and the horizontal shows the number of women that get lung cancer per
100000 women. And immediately you can see that lung cancer
is mainly a male disease. But the proportion between men and women differ between the countries.
Look here at Morocco. We have two cases of lung cancer in women compared to twenty in
men. It's 10% in women compared to men. It's 10% in women compared to men.
I go to Russia I find the same thing: 67 per 100000 men, 6.6 per 100000 in women.
Once more, 10% just in women compared to men. If I move to the Netherlands, it's about 30%
in women compared to men. If I go over here to Denmark, I find about 66% of all lung cancer
in women compared to men. And of course, the reason for this you understand. The main cause
of lung cancer is smoking. And in different countries, the frequency of smoking varies
between men and women and it also varies what proportion of men and women smoke in the countries.
Interesting enough, there is only one country in the world: Iceland, where the frequency
of smoking is the same in both men and women and therefore, it is now gender equity in
lung cancer in Iceland. Let us look how lung cancer in men varies
with the economy of the country. I changed the horizontal axis and instead I show income
per person in comparable inflation-adjusted dollars. You can see now that the poorest
countries, mainly the dark blue here from Africa, there is very low lung cancer level because
people cannot afford cigarettes or very few can afford cigarettes. As soon as countries
get a little richer, look at China here, for instance, and then Russia, smoking increases
in most countries but not in all. Mainly you can see, if I blink here, the green
Arab countries tend to be lower. Smoking is a little less there. They tend to be lower
in lung cancer. And the highest is here in the upper-middle income countries. And then
the United States is lower and many of the richer countries have relatively low lung
cancer frequency. Let me show you our neighboring country, Finland
that has made a very successful preventive campaign. Finland used to have high lung cancer
already in the 50s. And it increased and it increased and then they started to promote
stop smoking. Smoking was reduced but it took some time until it had an effect on lung cancer
and then it had come down quite enormously. So 2002, Finland is now among the lower countries
in its income group. And it's good to know that for a country like
Poland, which has 82 cases of lung cancer per 100000 men, it's the same as Finland had
in 1969. And today, Finland has fallen from a level of 80 per 100000 down to a level of 33, more
than half. And there is still no cure for most of the
cases for lung cancer. There is no other prevention than to stop smoking. And we hope that most
countries, most people, most individuals will be successful in stopping to smoke.