There were an estimated 18.1 million cancer cases around the world in 2020, according to the World Cancer Research Fund International. Of those cases, the United States had the fourth highest number of new diagnoses, with 362 cases per 100,000 people.
These statistics are age-standardized — a summary measure of the rate of disease that a population would have if it had a standard age structure.
Age has a powerful influence on the risk of dying from cancer, and many developing countries have a greater proportion of younger people than countries that are more developed and may have more older than younger people.
Standardization is necessary when comparing populations that differ in respects to age because otherwise countries with older populations would have vastly higher rates of cancer.
What are the countries with the highest cancer rates?
- Australia
- New Zealand
- Ireland
- United States
- Denmark
- Belgium
- The Netherlands
- Canada
- France
- Norway
What are the countries with the lowest cancer rates?
- Sudan
- South Sudan
- Djibouti
- Timor-Leste
- Tajikistan
- Republic of Congo
- Bhutan
- Nepal
- The Republic of Gambia
- Niger
Highest versus lowest:
- Australia: 452 per 100,000 people
- Singapore (lowest in the top 50): 233 per 100,000 people
- Niger (actual lowest) 78 per 100,000 people
The difficulty of tracking cancer rates
“Recording cancer occurrences and deaths is a very complex task,” says Timothy Rebbeck, PhD, associate director for Dana-Farber’s Center for Cancer Equity and Engagement and researcher in the Division of Population Sciences. “In some countries, there is a good capture of cancer rates. However, data in many countries data collection is poor, and the rate estimates rely heavily on models. These models make many assumptions. Depending on how off you are with your assumptions, you could be orders of magnitude off the actual rates.”
Rebbeck also says that the accuracy of cancer data can vary depending on the type of cancer. Breast cancer, for example is relatively identifiable, and doesn’t cause immediate death. All of this makes it easier to capture and track than a disease like prostate cancer, which might not come to clinical attention for a long time, if ever.
“In many places, the rates of prostate cancer are estimated to be very low, but that’s just because we don’t see most of them,” says Rebbeck.
Other cancers, like pancreatic cancer, has a high mortality rate, and many patients die before they are diagnosed. That information may not be recorded in the data that researchers work from.
Why do countries have low cancer rates?
The wide discrepancy in rates of cancer between the countries with the highest rates and the lowest rates is most likely due to insufficient poor data collection in developing nations. Countries like Niger and Sudan do not necessarily have lower rates of cancer; rather, these nations simply do not have the infrastructure to accurately and completely identify and register those cases.
“Some of the issue arises from the data that can be collected,” says Rebbeck. “We have numbers, but mostly — aside from places like the United States and Northern Europe — they’re not very complete.”
It’s estimated that less than 2% of the population of the entire continent of Africa is captured in the cancer data that are available, for example. In contrast, over 85% of the population is captured in cancer registries in North America.
“When you layer so many factors like healthcare access, risk factors, exposures, and prevention strategies, it is difficult to know why variations in cancer rates occur, particularly when we have limited data with which to understand these factors” Rebbeck continues,
What factors lead to high cancer rates in a country?
There are many factors that may cause higher cancer rates in a country. Many, if not all, are systemic and can be linked back to social determinants of health — the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.
For example, “populations with better education, higher incomes and lower inequalities, active cancer control policies and programs and high performing health systems have better cancer outcomes as reflected in lower MIRs [mortality to incidence ratio] relative to other populations,” a 2019 report noted.
It is difficult to nail down exactly reasons for different rates among countries, or why Australia and the United States have higher rates versus Israel and Japan, for example. There is no single factor that can explain this difference.
“There are reasons for variation in cancer rates that we can point to, but there are other factors that we either have poor data on or don’t have a complete understanding of,” says Rebbeck.
The World Cancer Research Fund suggests that higher cancer rates are impacted by diet and lifestyle factors. For example:
- Consuming enough wholegrains, vegetables, and fruit can decrease risk of developing colorectal and prostate cancers.
- On the other hand, overconsumption of alcohol increases the risk of oral, esophageal, breast, colorectal, stomach, and liver cancers.
- Being physically active has been found to decrease the risk of colon, breast, and endometrial cancer.
“It has to do with patterns of exposure to many things like obesity, smoking, sedentary lifestyle, and a poor diet,” says Rebbeck. “Those factors are big drivers of high cancer rates. Since these exposures are changing in Africa and other regions to look more like exposures in developed nations, we can guess that cancer rates in many parts of the world will increase in the coming years.”
Risk factors can significantly impact rates of cancers across countries. Rebbeck — whose work mainly focuses on African nations — points out that people in northern Africa smoke more than people in sub-Saharan Africa. This has led to higher rates of lung cancer in northern Africa.
In some cases, high rates of certain types of cancer are also tied up in the lack of preventative measures. In the developing world, cervical cancer is a leading cause of death for women, while it isn’t a threat in places like the United States where HPV vaccines and screening measures are widely available.
However, it is again important to note that access to these diet and lifestyle choices that can reduce risk — and the ability to make changes — is not even across the board.
It seems likely to me that age/longevity is the actual reason for these differences. We know that age is the single greatest risk factor for all cancers and we can see that the countries with the highest cancer rates have much greater longevity than the countries with the lowest rates.
Excellent point.
These figures, with the highest and lowest frequency of cancer, are poorly made. They have not taken into consideration that the countries with the highest frequency of cancer is the wealthier countries with good medicine, hospitals and generaly have a much longer lifespan compared to the countries with the lower frequences of cancer, whereas people die before they reach the age when cancer is a problem.
But that is not how the story ends. You always need to put the information in perspective, and look at it from another angle. You have to think about the richer countries that eat more red meat, deep fried food, and generaly more unhealthy than the finacially difficult countries. This unhealthy living can create more cancer among the people. Also the countries with higher cancer frequencies have paler skin because there is not as much sun in these countries, but when people go on a holiday for a week in some exotic place and become as red as a tomato, they increase the chance of cancer. Whereas the countries with low cancer frequencies, have darker skin and are more immune to strong UV rays from the sun. It is also because most days in the countries with lower cancer frequencies, the sun shines, this means that people will have a stable comsumption of UV rays, which they european countries have colder weather most of the year. Then when they are on holiday and get a burst of UV rays, the explosive comsumption of UV rays can spark mutations to occure more frequent by the unstable comsumption.
Have you ever thought that it has a lot to do with the lack of actual food, read the back of a Hungry Man TV dinner sometime, there are about 168 chemicals in one of those, yum. Americans have been eating red meat since we killed the first cow and we have not had cancer for 1000’s of years. How about the lack of fat in our diet. Our brains are made up of about 60 percent fat.
You mentioned the culprit….chemicals!
Japan has great longevity but nowhere on the list for high cancer
In my own personal opinion, looking at different research. Cancer might occur more often as you say as due to increased age, athough I haven’t read anything to support this. But regardless of age, Cancer is not something we are born with, we are not meant to be ill, therefore what we consume and the environment is the reason. Food, water, air, stress etc…but if you look at any research to see where the highest and lowest cancer rates you will see that countries which are poor, high in veg & fruit, but too expensive to buy meat, are where the less cancer rates are (parts of Africa, South-West Asia). Which suggests diet, our food, which is our fuel, is one of THE reasons.
Why live a longer life full of sorrow, loneliness, misery when you can die slightly younger with a full happy life. These people who have nothing walk around with a smile on there face I’ve seen it, there happy around there “FAMILY”.
Bad science. You didn’t factor in detection rates. That is the health care system in Denmark is better at detecting cancer than say the health care system in Nigeria. This is common sense and empirically verifiable.
Dear Peter —
Thank you for your comment. This data for this infographic was sourced from the International Agency for Research on Cancer GLOBOCAN project. More information on the data, including sources and methods, can be found at http://globocan.iarc.fr. Thank you again for reading our Insight blog.
Another thing to consider is reportage, how many names for cancer are not cancer. Also, how about the fiasco up in northern Alberta in Canada where there were so many ”irregular” births that the data was removed from the web so as not to embarrass the fracking frackers at the SCAR sands.
*Errors corrected
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/all-cancers/by-country/
Cancer occurs mainly in old age and as such those countries with low cancer rates are the ones where the people die before they reach the cancer age.
One top of that poorer countries like Niger, Bhutan and Gambia do not have enough of qualified doctors to make the diagnosis of cancer and most types of cancer needs sophisticated diagnostic personnel and equipment to facilitate the diagnosis.
What you must also take into consideration is diets. In these countries where there are lower instance rates they tend to have a more organic diet; ie eating native fruits and vegetables grown locally opposed to lots of protein in more industrialized nations. This also links to cancer incident rates. In America our life expectancy rate went DOWN from what it was in the past. This is because of poor eating habits, chemicals, gmo foods, etc not diagnosed in elderly but in an alarmingly increasing number of age ranges that should be healthy otherwise. To say poor detection is the reason of disparity among numbers and average life span is to ignore other scientific, quantifiable data that exists to the contrary. It is directly tied in to food systems, agricultural processes, toxins and added dna fragments to plant species in order to yield more desirable results on a profitability landscape. Do not brush these aside while compiling data and adhere biases propagated by the uneducated or poorly educated.
Agree 100% with Jutin Davis’ comments. The quality of life for the last 20 years of your life span is very poor in the most advanced countries like Norway, USA, Denmark due to the high toxicity levels in food in these countries……
As you can tell, countries with higher cancer rates are the ones that comsume more red meat…
Counties in South America have some of the highest red meat diets. So, why aren’t they in the top five?
well it seems to me that we already have figured out what causes cancer and how to cure it just with the comments on this blog. Well done people you all have done what billions of dollars and hundreds of medical scientists couldn’t do.
my sentiments exactly
Shiva
The prevalence of Cancer, i think must not be assessed just by these statistics. They keep varying and depend on a lot of factors. Better diagnostics and equipments always pave the way for better diagnosing. There are obviously some countries where there is no such modern cancer detection facilities. Henceforth, what needs to be addressed is the spiking cancer rates and their effective control and prevention all over the world. The need of the hour is to ascertain the risk factors and creating awareness about screening tests. There are however a lot of hospitals out there encashing and exploiting the rise in cancer. I have been made to remain dreaded of the disease as, i know the conditions here in India and i myself have many relatives who suffered from cancer.
Cancer is often considered a disease of affluence, but about 70% of cancer deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.
Because they cannot afford to treat it!
A female scientist contracted cancer she set to work researching cause of cancer. After lengthy research she came up with over 60 percent of cancers where coursed by outside influence for example vehicle exhaust fumes general pollutions in the atmosphere to much sun uv work environments aircraft pollution. Also polluted foods fruits and vegetables use of pesticides smoking cigarettes full of chemicals alcohol in particular excessive beer drinking which is now known to cause colon cancer.