Cancer deaths down by a third in 30 years, survival rates of up to 99 per cent thanks to better drugs, vaccines, screening, lifestyle changes and targeted therapy

Screening for some cancers is so effective now that if common forms of the disease are spotted early, survival rates are as high as 99 per cent

Oncology rooms are full not because more are getting cancer, but because fewer are dying from it but are having their cases managed, a leading doctor says

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Cancer survival rates have shot up with the introduction of more and better drugs, vaccines (above), screening, blood tests, lifestyle changes and targeted therapy. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 6:15pm, 4 Feb 2023Updated: 11:51am, 6 Feb 2023

Receiving a diagnosis of cancer used to mean being handed a death sentence. As recently as the 1970s, being told you had cancer meant hearing you had a 50-50 chance of survival.

If you did survive, it was often the result of blanket therapies which hit the whole body hard while trying to target mutations: huge doses of highly toxic chemotherapy, and sometimes disfiguring surgery, were the only available options.

So little was understood about the disease in the ’60s that an old fear that cancer was contagious gained traction following a rise in childhood leukaemia in the US state of Illinois. People there worried the “epidemic” was because of a “cancer virus”.

Those who lived or worked with sufferers would spray surfaces with disinfectant – similar to the recent Covid-19 pandemic – and were vigilant about not sharing cutlery or crockery with them.

Oncologist Dr Tony Mok says his field has changed beyond recognition in the past 25 years. Photo: Dr Tony Mok

Cancer is so well understood now that the prognosis for patients is entirely different. Professor Tony Mok, chairman of the department of clinical oncology at Chinese University of Hong Kong, says the field of oncology has changed beyond recognition in the past 25 years, never mind the past 50.

Between 1975 and 2016, the five-year survival rate – five years being a benchmark for estimating prognosis – rose significantly.