U.S cancer death rate drops

The American Cancer Society on Wednesday reported the largest-ever one-year decline in the rate of U.S. deaths from cancer. The rate has fallen by about 1.5 percent a year since 1991, but that accelerated to 2.5 percent between 2016 and 2017. Rebecca Siegel, the lead author of the report, said that’s the largest drop in national cancer statistics since 1930.

What caused the decline? Siegel said advances in lung cancer treatments drove most of the decline. Smoking has also been on the decline for decades, leading to falling cancer rates. When lung cancer is removed from the calculation, the cancer death rate declined by 1.4 percent in 2017. The mortality rate for melanoma skin cancer fell 7 percent a year recently, also due to new drugs.

Dig deeper: Read Kent Covington’s report in The Sift about the first U.S. test of a cancer treatment using the CRISPR gene-editing tool.