This widely reported news article on a recent study showed what we have always known. Oral cancer occurs more in people of lower income and education. The supposition here is that they engage in more risk factors, (smoking and drinking) and that they have poorer access to healthcare and routine screening opportunities so finds are later. They also have lower incomes and less insurance, both leading to a protracted period of not seeking medical advice when things start to go wrong. These socio-economic issue have been at play in many disease states in the US for a long time, and are not likely to change anytime soon.

Any progress we have made against treating this disease (evidenced by a decline in the death rate) is nonsense. We are seeing a greater percentage of cases come from HPV16 which responds better to the treatments which have not changed. So while medicine/science would like to claim progress, the only real change is cause, and that cause has a survival advantage.

Here is a link that was put up in the OCF news feed a while back about this work, and a comment following it. The studies author is the very prolific Amy Chen who has a propensity to publish often on things we already have a pretty good understanding of. Publish or perish�

Please note that I didn't start this post out with yet another ask for people to subscribe (like the 33,000 others that do), to the free, and vetted for relevance and accuracy, OCF RSS oral cancer news feed, I have given up hope that posters will do so.

http://oralcancernews.org/wp/study-finds-fewer-dying-from-throat-mouth-cancer-in-the-u-s/