Should we just feel better informed, on a country-by-country basis, by the staggering global statistics of about 2 million new cases and 625000 deaths from breast and cervical cancer in 2010? These imperfect data, presented by Mohammad Forouzanfar and co-workers in The Lancet, have been derived and ingeniously modelled from more than 300 cancer registries and cause-of-death offices worldwide.1 What would happen in response to another global problem causing morbidity and mortality of a similar magnitude? For example, the global death toll owing to breast and cervical cancer is the equivalent of six large jets crashing every day. Other forms of cancer kill three times this number of women daily, and the number of cancer deaths is even larger in men, the darlings of the tobacco industry.
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