Prevention Is the Best Medicine

Sometimes the basic things can make the most impact.

If people avoided major risk factors for cancer, more than a third of the 7 million annual deaths from the disease could be prevented, scientists said on Friday.

In a report in The Lancet medical journal, the researchers estimated how many deaths from 12 types of cancer were caused by exposure to nine risk factors.

They calculated that smoking, alcohol, obesity, poor diet, unsafe sex, lack of exercise and other factors contributed to 2.43 million cancer deaths worldwide in 2001.

"A third of cancer deaths could have been avoided had those risks been reduced," said Dr Majid Ezzati of the Harvard School of Public Health in the United States.

"Prevention is probably still our best bet for reducing cancer deaths. It is by far larger than what we may be able to achieve using medical technology."

Smoking, which is linked to lung, mouth, stomach, pancreatic and bladder cancers, is the biggest avoidable risk factor, followed by alcohol and not eating enough fruits and vegetables.

"Of the 2.43 million deaths, 37 percent of them are from lung cancer," said Ezzati. "The total lung cancer deaths in the world are 1.23 million and of those 900,000 of them are caused by these risk factors."