I can speak in terms of trends of cancer. Cancer and heart disease are the two biggest killers. As we age, as we survive other diseases, we're more likely to get cancer. Individual rates for any given age for many cancers are decreasing, not increasing. So your risk of getting stomach cancer at the age of 50 now is less than it was in the 1950s. With the reductions in smoking, the risk of getting lung cancer also is declining for those groups. On the other hand, as we've seen increased rates of smoking in young women, we've seen lung cancer overtake breast cancer as the largest killer of women, at least amongst the cancers.
As we move forward, given cancer is a variety of diseases, it is a mixed picture of increases and decreases. In general, though, the risks of most cancers have declined, in part because of the reduction of major...including natural cancer-causing agents like aflatoxins in foods—we've seen some improvements in stomach cancers and others as we move forward.
We're obviously all keen to prevent as many preventable diseases as possible. Cancer as a whole, heart and lung diseases, and stroke are our biggest killers. Again, there's lots of room for improvement in prevention.