Leading dying edge
If you saw the Associated Press article on today's print front page about cancer becoming the world's leading cause of death by 2010, you might have thought it sounded familiar. That's because North Carolina and Guilford County already have crossed that threshold.
In N.C. and locally, heart disease had been the leading killer for almost 90 years. Worldwide, heart disease is the current top killer, although it hasn't been in the top spot as long.
In the U.S., death rates from both heart disease and smoking are falling, but heart-disease rates are falling faster. The drop in cancer rates has been driven by a decrease in the smoking rate.
But worldwide, particularly in developing countries -- and especially in China and India, where about 40 percent of current smokers worldwide now live -- the shift is being driven mainly by increasing tobacco use.
The trend is likely to boost those countries' health-care costs tremendously, if overwhelmed health-care systems don't just let people die. And it will be interesting to see if governments in these countries go after the tobacco makers legally, or allow private lawsuits against them to proceed, as has happened in the U.S. And it's unclear what effect the tobacco-control treaty signed by more than 190 countries will have.
