From Caijing Magazine:
This has been a year for funerals — and questions about cancer in China — for a professional woman in Beijing named Liu.
“I have attended three of my friends’ funeral ceremonies this year,” she told Caijing recently. “Two died from stomach cancer, the other from lung cancer.”
Then with a sigh, Liu posed a question that reflects China’s rising anxiety over cancer and its frightening health statistics. “Is it true that only old people tend to get cancer?”
Cancer death rates are rising dramatically in China, and not only among the elderly. Results from an exhaustive survey conducted by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Science and Technology said the nation’s cancer death rate has risen 80 percent in the past 30 years to 136 per 100,000 citizens, from 74 in the mid-1970s and 108 in the early 1990s.