Breast cancer is reported 20 times more frequently than bladder cancer
Breast cancer is reported almost 20 times more frequently in the media than bladder cancer. There are ‘surprising differences,’ said the director of the Cancer Registry.
The Cancer Registry found that the words ‘bladder cancer’ are registered in 2,000 searches, while breast cancer is reported almost 20 times as often, over 38,800 times.
‘It is surprising that the differences are so big, and not least that such a large cancerous type as bladder cancer is so little visible by comparison to breast cancer. Among men, this is actually the fourth largest form of cancer’, said the director of the Cancer Registry, Giske Ursin.
Skin cancer, the fifth largest cancer among men, is referred to more than 11,000 times.
Prostate cancer, which is the largest cancer type in men, in total, is mentioned nearly 17,700 times. Erik Skaaheim Haug, chief physician at the hospital in Vestfold, and head of the Norwegian Bladder Cancer Group, agrees that the results are remarkable.
‘There is more and more openness about cancer, but bladder cancer is completely on the sidelines in this context. It may have unfortunate consequences because many people don’t know about early warning signs of the disease, such as blood in the urine, and they therefore come to treatment later.’
In addition, Haug points to a major relationship between the risk of bladder cancer and smoking.
‘We estimate that about half of the 1,500 annual cases of bladder cancer could have been avoided if the patient hadn’t smoked,’ he said.
Another major question, that seems too rarely asked, is why companies are still able to sell tobacco legally over the counter, and why states are still able to gain huge tax revenues from a substance that is found in all clinical tests to be massively more harmful to human health than cannabis.
© NTB Scanpix / holdpusten.no / Norway Today
