Cancer accounts for 28% of deaths in the UK and kills about 165k people a year here.
i reckon the actual figure is much higher.
start of 2017 i got aphone call from my sister saying mum had been rushed into Barts as she had Leukaemia.
we were told at the time that about 5%, just one in twenty, survive (survive meaning that after five years you are still breathing regardless of whether the blood cancer is still there) and supposedly she had one of the most curable blood cancers.
she eventually died about 14 months later and that was put down to pneumonia. but it was the cancer that killed her.
a similar thing happened to my uncle a few months earlier. big fat bastid. type 2 diabetes. went into hospital. his foot fell off and then died of pneumonia. again. the real cause of death was not recorded as such.
it does kinda make me wonder whether the docs are right to try and cure everything that they come across, even when they know the chance of survival is slim.
in a twisted kinda way i wish that the docs had let my mum succumb to the cancer rather than putting her and us, her family – immediate and extended, through an awful lot of pain.
and that is aside from the fact that each bout of chemo (that is, each syringe full of chemo, not he week long treatment) cost over 8K. the care that my mum received was amazing, but for her and ultimately most of the other people in that hospital , was for nothing. a few months, or maybe years at best.
if it isn’t/wasn’t cancer our society would find other ways of killing itself. i think the next big issue will be both antibiotic resistance and shit diet/gluttony, sorry obesity.