"Cancer cases rising at an alarming rate worldwide"

From NPR:

As countries modernize around the world, they're increasingly being hit with one of the curses of wealth: cancer. 

There are about 14 million new cancer cases globally each year, the World Health Organization reported Monday. And the trend is only getting worse. 

The global burden of cancer will grow by 70 percent over the next two decades, the WHO predicts, with an estimated 22 million new cases and 13 million deaths each year by 2032. 

The majority of cases now occur in low- and middle-income countries, the agency found. Many of these nations' health care systems are ill-equipped to deal with the flood of complicated conditions that go along with disease. 

Cancer in the developing world is a "time bomb," says Dr. Bernard Stewart, an epidemiologist at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia, who helped edit the WHO report. The problem, Stewart says, is that treatment availability for cancer hasn't kept up with the rise in its prevalence. 

The long-held idea that cancer is a disease that affects primarily rich countries is slowly being undermined. You're still more likely to get cancer if you live in a wealthy country than if you live in a developing one. But you're more likely to die from the disease if you live in a poor country because cancer is often detected later in developing countries, and treatments are limited.

Many of the points made are perfectly valid-- it's important to develop effective and affordable ways of treating and preventing cancer, especially in poorer countries in which the extraordinarily expensive types of treatment we use in the rich nations of the world (chemotherapy, radiation therapy, bone marrow transplants) are much more difficult to provide.

But we must be careful about the "cancer epidemic" meme. The fact is that the most important cause of cancer-- without rival-- is survival. Cancer is a disease of older people. It is rare in the young, but fairly common as we age. In developing countries, the cancer "rate" will naturally go up as the population ages-- as infant mortality is reduced, as better treatments for infectious diseases are employed. In addition, populations in some countries (e.g. China) are aging rapidly because of population control.

The cancer rate is very much a function of the age of a population. People in poor countries are living longer, and they are surviving long enough to get cancer. It is a mixed blessing. And in many poor countries, there are fewer children born, which markedly skews demographics to older cancer-prone people.

I have become so cynical about scientists lately-- the global warming fraud, Darwinist ideology posing as evolutionary biology, not to mention the historic frauds like eugenics and DDT hysteria-- that I wonder if this "cancer epidemic" press release is merely an effort by scientists to gin up funding for cancer research. There's always some new science crisis, and the new crisis always seems to require... wait for it... more money and power to scientists.

Yet cancer research is certainly a worthwhile endeavor, even if the crisis is hyped a bit, but I'm suspicious that the scientists aren't fessing up about the real cause for the "cancer epidemic", which is longer lifespans and aging populations in poor countries.