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Voice Off: Breast Cancer Statistics, a Gapminder video with Hans Rosling.
Hans Rosling: Already 1958, breast cancer was the most common form of cancer among women
in Sweden. Look at my graph here. The vertical axis shows the number of new cases
of breast cancer were one hundred thousand women. The horizontal axis shows income per person. It
was eleven thousand dollars at this time, forty years ago in Sweden. Look what happened
when Sweden started to grow richer and richer. Breast cancer increased. We had a higher proportion
of women with breast cancer each year. Researchers tell us it is due to a new lifestyle with
higher caloric intake, less physical activity and also changes in reproduction and breast feeding.
Now let me compare this with the rest of the world. I will, here, show you every country
like a bubble. The size of the bubble is the size of the population. China down there,
the United States up here. And the color shows the continent. Yellow for America, blue for
Africa, green for Arab countries, Europe is brown and East Asia here is red.
Now what this shows you is that this change in Sweden, with higher income gives higher breast
cancer, fits exactly with the general pattern in the whole world. This is what we are seeing.
Now what happens to these women in the richest countries who get breast cancer? Do they die
or do they survive? I will change the horizontal axis here so that instead it shows the proportion
of women dying of breast cancer. The vertical axis shows the number of new cases and the
horizontal shows the death. Now look again on the Swedish pattern.
You can see as Sweden got more and more breast cancer the proportion of women dying in breast
cancer didn't increase. Obviously the reason is that a higher and higher proportion get
cured. Today in Sweden, this decade, we have the data from 2002 for all countries. It's
about fifteen per 100,000 who die whereas about almost ninety get cancer,
most of the women with breast cancer in Sweden survive today.
And countries down here like Pakistan and Nigeria are estimated to have less than half
the number of new cases but they have even higher proportion of women dying. This data
from 2002 is the best available estimates by the leading specialists of cancer statistics
in the world from the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon. They are linked
to the World Health Organization. And they may estimate for all countries the little
strange line here above that's lying like this. The reason is the health for some countries
where there is not enough data they use estimates for similar countries where we know the proportion
dying and the proportion who gets the cancer. So, it's an uncertain statistic but the pattern
is very clear. We have now in middle income countries with growing economy about a billion women
who moves into a life situation where they will get more and more breast cancer
but, the drama is, they will not be able to afford the treatment. How can we make breast
cancer treatment affordable for a larger part of the world population?