By Maria Cendejas

Friday Jan 13, 2012 (foodconsumer.org) -- A new report from the American Cancer Society says fewer Americans are dying of cancer. The society's annual report on cancer statistics shows that cancer death rates have gone down nearly 2% for both men and women over the past 5 years.

But experts are concerned that those declines aren't scratching the surface of what Americans could do to reduce the risk of cancer.

For the report titled Cancer Statistics 2012, researchers looked at data available from 1999-2008 to find the current state of cancer in the U.S. 

The declines in men's and women's cancer death rates were mainly driven by a 40% decline in the number of men dying of lung cancer, and a 34 % drop in the number of women dying from breast cancer. 

Lung cancer deaths likely decreased because fewer Americans are smoking, and the decline in breast cancer deaths may reflect that many more women are getting mammogram screening.

"Most of the progress in cancer has been incremental. There are more and more Americans who have gotten a little farther away from their last cigarette. The colonoscopy screening rates are nowhere where they should be, but they are slowly creeping up. The mammography screening rates are better as compared to a decade ago." Dr. Michael V. Seiden, president and CEO of Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, told WebMD.

Since 1999, cancer death rates have been on the decline among men and women of every ethnic group with the exception of American Indians/Alaska Natives whose rates remained steady.

The most rapid declines in cancer deaths have been seen among African American and Hispanic men. Their death rates declined by 2.4% and 2.3% per year, respectively. 

The report shows that the death rates of cancer have slowly declined among men since 1990 and among women since 1991. That translates to more than 1 million cancer deaths avoided.

Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, told CNN that America could have done a lot better.  Brawley said that  more than 200,000 cancer deaths in 2008 could have been prevented if people took better care of themselves and smoked less. 

The falling cancer death rates doesn't necessarily mean fewer people are getting cancer. 

It showed a decline in rates of most types of cancers, but other cancers are on the rise- like thyroid, throat, pancreatic, kidney cancer, and melanoma. Part of those increases may be due to better screening or the fact that more and more Americans are becoming obese. 

The American Cancer Society projects  that there will be more than 1.6 million new cancer cases and more than 577,000 deaths from cancer in 2012.

A health observer suggested that the decline in the rates of cancer deaths does not necessarily mean that the treatments are more effective.  One possible reason is that early diagnosis due to cancer screenings allows patients to have a better chance to live for more than 5 years after diagnosis.  

For instance, a woman has clinical symptoms of breast cancer in 2017.  If she does not receive treatment, assume she dies three years later. In this case, she is not a survivor. But if she is diagnosed by mammogram screening with breast cancer in 2013. Even if she does not receive any treatment, she will likely have 3+4 years to live.  In this case, she is a survivor.  That is one reason why cancer deaths are on the decline.