PEI has the highest cancer mortality rates in Canada. As you will see from the stats below, you as an Islander will have a very good chance of getting cancer and dying from it. As the husband of a cancer person, I can also remind you that the treatment is as bad as dying. As a citizen, I also worry as the costs of treatment are very high.
But we give only lip service to prevention.
Nothing was said to my wife about how she might live her life so to reduce her chances of a recurrence - other than to keep her porto cath (a device put in a vein in her chest to make it easy to give her more chemo) and to take a drup Tamoxifen that has brutal side effects.
Lung Cancer rates are down nationally. No thanks to medicine. It's all due to the public health message getting through. It is fewer people smoking.
We will get all cancer rates down, if we do the same for the underlying causes. We have to get serious about the lifestyle issues that drive the other cancers. We have to get the facts right about what we must stop doing to have a better chance.
It is not your genes and things that are outside of your control that give you cancer. It is food and other choices. When we come to grips with this, we will have to same success that we are seeing with smoking.
Lecture over - here is the data. You can choose to be a cancer patient or not.
Overall, though, the picture still remains quite alarming. The province continues to have the highest incidence rate among men and the highest mortality rates among women compared to the rest of the country.
The Canadian Cancer Society estimates that there will be 186,400 new cases of cancer in the country this year with 75,700 deaths anticipated.
About 880 Islanders will be diagnosed with cancer and approximately 380 will die from the disease in 2012. Of these newly diagnosed cases, more than half will be prostate, lung, colorectal and breast cancer.
The Canadian Cancer Society reports that if this trend continues, 40 percent of women and 45 percent of men will be diagnosed with cancer sometime in their life and approximately one in four will die from the disease.
Lung cancer continues to be the leading cause of death for Canadian men and women and Islanders are no exception. P.E.I. has the second highest mortality rate among men for lung cancer.
In 2012 an estimated 60 men and 45 women will die of lung cancer in this province and another 105 Islanders will be diagnosed with the disease.
Dr. Dagny Dryer, a medical oncologist at the P.E.I. Cancer Treatment Centre, is concerned by the overall high cancer rate in the province.
She notes a "significant problem'' exists with prostate cancer in P.E.I. and she is also struck by the number of new cases of breast cancer that are very advanced.
