.
Talk about your alarmist headlines. Prostate Cancer is one of the most commonly diagnosed, but hardly one of the most deadly (as implied by the alarming headline “Most common cancer kills 500 each week.”) This is not to underestimate the importance of getting tested for prostate cancer if you are a man, but it is far less deadly than brest or lung cancer. To compare apples to apples, almost 800 (mostly women) will die of breast cancer each week and almost 3,100 (a little more than half of these men) will die from lung cancer each week.
Personally, I want to declare war on all cancers, but let’s keep the hyperbole for the truly alarming statistics.
Here are some more facts relating federal research spending on prostate cancer as compared to other cancers:
In 2007:
$1,633 per lung cancer death
$13,471 per breast cancer death
$11,298 per prostate cancer death
$4,774 per colorectal cancer death
So men please get those prostates screened, but if you want something to panic over, you are far more likely to die from lung cancer than from prostate cancer.