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Comment by DangerousPie | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind this is the incidence of cancer diagnoses. The quality of healthcare, diagnosis standards, and amount of preemptive screening varies heavily between countries.

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Even in pretty terrible healthcare systems, I would expect that close to 99% of people dying from cancer will actually be diagnosed with cancer, even if done too late.

The lowest rates are in central Africa, places where Cold War uranium was sourced from mines worked by humans with no real protection, etc.

Are the low rates due to healthy living, poor diagnostics, or dying of [other] before the cancer scores a mortality?

The poorest countries are likely exception cases; compare middle- and high-income countries and there are still odd differences to be observed

Sure - I absolutely agree, Europe, Australia, Canada, the US et al all have excellent medical systems wrt those countries termed "the Global South".

Perhaps in poor healthcare locales the death certificate just says "dead". Some people might not see a doctor at any stage of the disease.

You might be able to claim that for some countries, but all European data should be reliable, all countries have reasonably good cause of death recording.

I'm not sure any European healthcare system rates as terrible, compared to the global average.

This data doesn't seem to have much to do with deaths though, unless there is something on the page I'm missing?

Yes. But I'd assume Europe would have at least equal diagnoses capability. So number of diagnoses should be similar.

So is US that much worse than Europe? Then we could start trying to pick apart differences, like diet, walking.

What’s interesting is that Poland appears to stand out in Europe

And it's unlikely to be due to better diagnosis than Switzerland…

One factor that Poland shares with the US is their enthusiasm for fracking. Could of course just be a coincidence.

Food? Polish Sausage. Maybe both big Sausage eaters. But then I'd think Germany would be similar?

Germany, Finland, probably a few others that eat a lot of sausage.

even Canada is half as much as USA but as it is still high compared to other so is dark blue

After listening to stories from my Canadian friends about how hard it is to just get basic medicine like antibiotics I'd expect this to be caused by a lack of screening/diagnosis rather than actual differences in cancer rates.

Do they live somewhere that requires a float plane to reach a doctor? I've never heard of a fellow Canadian having a hard time getting antibiotics, what a bizarre anecdote.

Nope, just Northern Ontario. I've driven to their houses from the US.

That's why I chose mostly developed countries when I posted.

Edit: I just realized that the link was changed. What I had initially was this: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cancer-incidence?tab=char...

AFAIU HN's posting system strips URL parameters.

If they're significant to your post you can email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com to restore them.

You might also want to write a top-level comment clarifying what you find significant about the URL and/or specific query.

The 2020, 2021 dip looks fishy, I would hypothize this is related to the pandemic lockdowns and overburdened hospitals reducing the number of cancer diagnoses. But it's a hypothesis that would need to be confirmed with the relevant numbers.

It would be useful if the data differentiated by type of cancer. For instance, skin cancer diagnosis is straightforward and inexpensive. Visual identification and a biopsy, led by the patient noticing a difference. Contrast that with pancreatic cancer, which requires imaging for diagnosis.

As it is the only meaningful conclusion to draw from this data is that we need more data.

Japan has a fuckton of that (yearly mandatory medical checks) but I don’t see their numbers being crazily inflated.

Japan, having ~the highest average age, should be on the top of the list but is not: second-highest bin. Australia is the skin cancer capital of the world ('Approximately 2 in 3 Australians will be diagnosed with skin cancer before the age of 70'), yet is in the third-highest bin. Isn't that interesting!

To control for this I personally like comparing Murica North vs Murica South. (USA vs AUS).

3,304 vs 750

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