The NYTimes wants to attribute the lung cancer increase to deteriorating air quality, but that’s incorrect.
From the NYTimes:
A few points:
- Two-thirds of Chinese men smoke.
- Lung cancer in China has been increasing for 40 years while air quality has only deteriorated (if that is even true) in the past 7 years.
- No doubt much of the spike in lung cancer is due not to more lung cancer but increased detection/diagnoses of lung cancers as Chinese medical care has improved.
There was a similar study in the 1980s, “the most polluted city in the world” (somewhere in Poland). The huge lung cancer problem was blamed on the air pollution but the cancer rates were only effecting men (most adult males smoked) – very few Polish women smoked and very few of them presented with lung cancer.
Has life expectancy also increased? Cancer death rates always go up when other causes of death are eliminated or delayed.
Your conclusions are “head in the sand science”
It sounds like a spokesman for the tobacco industry.