I've been posting recently about Cancer, and how various forms of cancer are now the leading cause of death in the U.S.  This interest is personal - I've lost my father to cancer, as well as some close friends - and professional - Aperio's customers are the Pathologists who diagnose cancer and researchers attempting to cure it.  Recently I came across some comprehensive statistics from the American Cancer Society which quantify the problem.  A summary of these statistics is shown at right.

In the U.S, in 2004, over 560,000 people will die as a result of cancer.  That's about the same as the entire populations of Boston or San Francisco.  Wow, talk about a killer.

This sure puts the U.S. combat deaths in Iraq in perspective.  As of May 11, 560 U.S. servicemen have been killed in Iraq, three orders of magnitude fewer than will have been killed by cancer this year.  I don't want to minimize those deaths - at all - merely to put them in perspective.

At least I can get up in the morning knowing I'm working on the right problem.