NYT contradicts itself on war on cancer
The New York Times, which has been running a series of front-page articles on how we’ve lost the war on cancer, has an interesting little tidbit today–a few hundred words of an AP story crammed into the bottom left corner of page A24.
The story is about a report that predicts that by 2020, the death rate from colon cancer could be half what it was in 2000. But wait, as the TV pitchmen say, there’s more! “The estimate was made in an annual report that shows that, over all, the cancer death rate in the United States is continuing to decline, as it has since the 1990s,” the AP story says.
Readers who can find this scrap buried in today’s paper might wonder why the Times is telling us we’ve lost the war on cancer while also reporting that the death rate has been declining for almost 20 years.
If the Times reported that we were losing the war in Afghanistan but that the violence and deaths there were dropping, we would want an explanation of what the paper means by “losing.”
We should expect the same here. How can we be losing the war on cancer if death rates are falling? And why is “losing the war” all over page 1, while falling death rates are shoehorned into a hole on A24?
- Paul Raeburn
December 8th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
“How can we be losing the war on cancer if death rates are falling?”
Perhaps because the war metaphor seems to require some clearcut “victory.”
If we’re in Afghanistan for another 13 years and violence and deaths are still merely “dropping,” most people would not call that a victory.
There’s a good article on cancer in the current Skeptical Inquirer, by Reynold Specter, of the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Quirks & Quarks had a special on cancer as a chronic disease:
http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/09-10/qq-2009-10-31.html#1