Paul McGee of American Cancer Society has pointed me to a report from The Washington Post, entitled: The Less the Education, The Higher Risk of Dying Cancer.
Quite catchy eh? I totally agree. From the said report, it says: “The difference in death rates between highly educated and poorly educated people in the United States is very wide and growing wider”.
For Americans with less than a high school education, the risk of dying prematurely is on the increase — rising most quickly for white women in that category. In contrast, the risk of premature death among college graduates is falling — fastest of all for black men.
White high school dropouts are four times as likely to die young as white college graduates, up from a threefold difference in the early 1990s. Among blacks, the trend is similar but less dramatic.
As a side story to this report, lemme just tell you a story the other night, while my mother and I were watching the Philippine news with an update on how the Former Pres. Cory Aquino is faring well with her treatments since she was recently diagnosed with colon cancer. (I wanted to say this particular sentence for the tons of well-wishers to Cory that this blog got.)
And then the news went on about how colon cancer is quite rare in the Philippines, or something to that effect. So my mother and I couldn’t agree more in saying that Cory is just lucky she has money and all, that’s why when she was diagnosed, she can go ahead with the treatments available to her.
Well in fact, for all we know…there are many cancer cases in the barrios (remote, poor villages) and they just die without knowing it is cancer or what, simply because they haven’t even been diagnosed. Because, yes they are less educated, of less fortunate financial status and might not have been seeing doctors all their lives! As is most probably the case anywhere else.
So maybe that’s why the statistics is low, because there are no data recorded in the first place!
Indeed people like Cory Aquino in this country is very lucky like most educated insured Americans and other citizens in the rest of the world — who can afford treatment and best of available healthcare.
Thus I totally agree with what’s said in the above report:
The study, published online yesterday, is the second this spring to reveal an ominous trend toward worsening health and earlier death in disadvantaged segments of the population, especially in certain groups of women.
“Socioeconomic disparity in mortality is pervasive, and it continues to increase,” said Ahmedin Jemal, an epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society who lead the study.
A co-author, Robert N. Anderson of the National Center for Health Statistics, said the growing gap “says something about the overall health of our population.” He added: “The haves seem to be doing quite well, and their mortality is going down. But those who don’t have their resources are not doing so well.”
So I guess it all boils down to something very basic that people should have: education.
Education just changes everything in a person’s life - with or without cancer. ;-) What education bring to people simply transcend race, economic status and every factor there is known. And I mean that in a global context — it is just true anywhere else.
Tags: cancer, cancer death, cancer mortality, college education, educationShare This
Mental health is important to every individual, whether you have a serious condition such as cancer or not.
