I was doing some research today trying to think what I wanted to write about and found the most interesting things about cancer, the ages of diagnosis, and the rates of occurrence and death broken down by the types of cancer. I found all this information on the Center for Disease Controls website.
I am totally surprised when I looked at the map of the United States and see that the New England and both coasts of the US have a higher rate of breast cancer and the southern states have a lower rate of breast cancer. I grew up in Massachusetts and Rhode Island if I had grown up in a different part of the country would I still have gotten breast cancer?
I wanted to see if other types of cancer had certain states that had higher recurrences or if it was just breast cancer. So I was curious and started looking into cervical cancer. When it comes to cervical cancer the states with higher in breast cancer have the lower rates of cervical. It was almost like the maps were reversed. My curiosity is definitely peeked now.
Next I looked into colorectal cancer and the Midwest has the lowest rates of occurrence and the next lowest was the coastal states. If you look at leukemia states like Oklahoma, Kansas and Nebraska have almost double the rate of leukemia than Arizona, Florida and Mid-Atlantic States.
With Ovarian cancer the southern states have a much lower rate than Oklahoma, Colorado, New York by almost ½.
This next one I checked out was skin cancer and some of the states with the highest rates were not shocking like states on both coasts and along the Canadian border. Yet the southern coastal states have about half of the rates of occurrence.
The last one I looked into was lung cancer. The Eastern half of the US has almost double the rates of the West coast was this because of the mining and mills that so many eastern US states had developed around?
Now I am not a scientist, a doctor or anything like that. I am just me a 40 year old breast cancer survivor and just looking at the information that the CDC so graciously has put together I am wondering what was in the air, water or land that is causing certain cancers to be occurring higher there than anywhere else?