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.
Scientists are now thinking Cancer has a solid link to fructose. It’s the one thing our body doesn’t really need. It gets metabolized in our liver and coats it in fat.
When fructose is fed to cancer cells, it causes them to divide and multiply rapidly. Fructose is in nearly every damn food you can pull off the shelf, and it’s usually in the form of high fructose corn syrup.
Next time your in a store, look at a label. Look under carbs to see if it has sugar in it. If it does, it’s high fructose corn syrup, and nearly everything food out there has it.
That is the culprit, and the only way you’ll avoid it is by sticking to a diet in red meat, chicken, fish, veggies, nuts and seeds, with fruit sparingly. Which is basically what our ancestors did.
There is a reason why Japan is so low on the list in cancer yet have long lives; their traditional diets are basically absent of fructose.
interesting
@Amanda, totally agree with you. It’s a shame scientists have discovered it so late, something which was obvious to me since I was a teenager. Cancer feeds on sugar, which is also in fruit, which is seemingly not that beneficial to your healh as they caimed it to be. I’d opt for meat, fish, eggs, veggies.
It’s because red meat nor fat is the culprit. Sugar is. A lot of scientific research has proven it, contrary to the common belief. People have always eaten meat and fat, sugar wasn’t so omnipresent as it is now.
Why should we have to play Russian Roulette with our lives ? People sit and try to figure out what is healthier to eat.. fruit or meats ? This is not how people are supposed to be living, being concerned all the time if we choose the right food to live or the wrong food to die ! If what they are doing, altering our foods is making people sick than people need to take a stand and sue the people that are allowing these life threating chemicals into our foods. No different than half other law suits out there, like when people sue Mc D’s for gaining weight, or suing car companies for not standing by their word as per gas millage only these chemicals are killing people. Is it the governments way of population control ? All these chemically enhanced altered foods are allowed on the market today and then the injected chemicals into our animals, and sometimes even cloning our livestock, it has really got to make people suspicious about everyone and everything when it comes to our food and health. How many years have they been “trying” to find cures for cancer
but have not succeeded in the process. Think about when you were younger and if you can ever remember hearing of so many cancer cases on the news ? So what has changed from then until now? People grew up on T.V. dinners in the early days which was a popular food, so how can anyone pin point it? Maybe they are trying to find a cure when they should be looking at preventative shots against the cancer from attacking peoples systems, after all if it is coming from the foods we eat, than protect us from it !
Correlation does not imply causation.
Sun Light has proven to be a major factor, patients generally have a better prognosis during the summer than the winter winter.
Plus some contries are just better at locating the disease than others
To quote Data, “does not compute”. That conclusion would mean that countries other than the top ten don’t have access to medical services, so people are probably sick with cancer but don’t know it. That is beyond illogical. Get real, the US is in the top ten, so why so many cancer patients, talking into account there are medical services in every single state? Here is a hypothetical case, actually not hypothetical. My daughter was diagnosed with a type of leukemia that HAS BEEN linked to chemicals used in farming. She was afraid of chemotherapy, (not ever remotely as much as me, since I used to review high cost medical treatments, to determine needs and payment for one of the top two healthcare insurance company – signed paper so I can’t say which). I told her try a herbalist, she did, went in to remission, it became active, so she went back to the treatment, eight years later, she is fine. Father in law (very rich, very large farm) made fun of her. Karma got him and he got the same exact leukemia. Went to Mayo Clinic (rich after all). Six months later he died, a week before he asked me daughter for the name of her herbalist, which was a waste of time because she can no longer help people because as a condition of “practicing medicine without a licence” sentence, although she had a sign saying she was not a medical doctor and was only a herbalist, she is not in jail. Fast forward to now, youngest brother in law, has the same cancer and he was already told it had spread all over his body and his chances are slim. He is still in his late twenties. So what is the difference? All lived (or live since only one is dead so far) in the same 4,000 acre farm. Herbal treatment, change in diet to organic and cook from scratch, VS treatment at one of the best known and respected clinics. This (in theory) does not compute either. Me, as long as my only daughter if fine I have no complains. As to me, since I changed to organic and cook my own stuff (much which I also grow) at 69, I haven’t been sick since 1999. So much for age.
Came back after doing some more research, this time at the World Cancer Research Fund International. (“The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Executive Board has confirmed that World Cancer Research Fund International has been granted official relations status with the WHO.”) Same top ten, US still number 6, but there the top 50 were listed. So what is so strange. Puerto Rico and the US are under the exact same agency (the US Department of Health). So what? The US is number 6, Puerto Rico is number 50. Same agency, same accreditation people, same medical system. So why is there a 44 place difference. One guess: the diet.
Stop fooling yourselves and others with stupid explanations! Of course its the chemicals that cause cancer. We have so many chemicals in everything nowadays its not even funny. We’re all packed in cities, taught to stress out over anything, eating crap full of pesticides and such, breathing polluted air. HOW can we possibly remain healthy? And dont have blind trust in every scientist or every international organization out there, they are not God and many of these structures are supported by corporations.