Having just returned from a conference at the NCI related to oral cancer, I can tell you your number is not accurate as of last week's discussion. And please remember that while we all quote numbers, whether about alcohol or cancer, definitive numbers related to cancer cannot be had. The SEER numbers are only gathered from a few locations around the US, and then a best guestimate for the rest of the country is extrapolated from them. They are far from absolutes. Since the change is only a percent or two, given the guestimate that SEER numbers actually are, until there is a trend of consequence that can be tracked (there is not), everyone has agreed that the existing numbers are fairly accurate, and that is any decline is insignificant.

There is some data that suggests that HPV oropharyngeal and tonsillar cancers have slightly higher survival rates and are actually distinctly different diseases than the balance of oral cancers. This comes out of the work of Dr. Maura Gillison at Johns Hopkins, also a OCF science advisory board member. The population that they affect is completely different. White, educated, upper middle class, and equally divided by gender. This is very different from the demographics of other oral cancers. The etiology of the disease is also completely different being viral induced vs. conventional tobacco and alcohol carcinogen created. The trend of tobacco decline in the US tracked over the last 10 years, and the remaining constant of oral cancer occurrences remaining stable, would indicate that a new etiology is replacing an old, thus keeping the incidence numbers the same. If HPV 16 is really the growing cause, (and there is published evidence that it has grown as an oral cancer cause by about 3% per year for almost a decade now) and these have a slight survival advantage, then the close to 2% drop we have seen can be accounted for. That is the current thinking of the CDC Oral cancer Work Group which I have a seat on, and the people at the NIH/NIDCR whose senior scientist is an OCF science advisory board member, and that is also an unproven belief hypothesis at NCI.

Regardless of the lack of major improvements in treatment (what you are quoting are not considered major improvements as some institutions have for years done concurrent chemo and radiation, and the published data is just now coming out showing a slight survival advantage, but not in end results), I stand by the fact that until we are finding the disease at early stages when it is more susceptible to the modalities of treatment we have, the death rate will not decline significantly.