The World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced that cancer has surpassed heart disease as the number one cause of death in Australia and in many other countries.
WHO Director-General Margaret Chan, wrote in the World Cancer Report, "Those associated with the world of poverty, including infection-related cancers, are still common, while those associated with the world of plenty are increasingly prevalent, owing to the adoption of industrialised lifestyles, with increasing use of tobacco, consumption of alcohol and highly processed foods, and lack of physical activity,"
In the same report, Chan said that cancer is affecting two "vastly different worlds". Co-author of the report and University of NSW professor, Bernard Stewart, stated that in Australia, cancer seems be the implication of people's lifestyle choices and that cancer, in actuality, is a "largely preventable disease".
According to Stewart, the role that lifestyle decisions, or the people's personal decisions when it comes to health and lifestyle, should also be tackled in the discussions of preventing cancer along with regulation and legislation.
"We can't, as a world, treat our way out of the burden of cancer," he said in the Sydney Morning Herald. "We now know for certain that the vast majority of cancers are attributable to what have been called 'lifestyle choices', or decisions people make about their own situation."
Terry Slevin, who works with the Cancer Council of Australia, stated in a 2012 report that 2.4 to 3.7 million deaths due to cancer worldwide were actually preventable. Slevin called the attention of Australians to the amount of the alcohol that they are consuming and the fact that alcohol is one of the main causes of many types of cancer.
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that heart disease remains as the leading cause of death in the U.S with 597,689 fatalities in 2010 while cancer is still runner-up with 574,743 fatalities.
