In the seventies, President Nixon declared an ambitious goal and called it the “War on Cancer. However, a few decades later, we have to admit that we fell short as cancer rates still haven’t gone done.

When I asked my parents about how many people they knew with cancer when they were still children, they told me, maybe one or two. I am now 37 years old and I have to conclude that the situation has changed dramatically.

On average, currently 12.5 % of all women in the USA will get breast cancer at some point in their lives. That number was evidently not as bad just a few decades ago.

Nowadays, almost everybody knows someone with cancer. And very likely you will find someone within your own family.

In March of 2009 my wife Ann was diagnosed with breast cancer. My mother was diagnosed with cervical cancer only a few months later. And after I encountered blood in my urine, a CT-Scan result came back with another cancer diagnosis for our family. A larger tumor was found in my left kidney.

I am about to have surgery during which my kidney will be removed entirely. It’s insane. Cancer is everywhere. It’s not that remote mysterious disease anymore that was likely to spare you.

So there is no way to say it: Cancer is actually growing, even though research and sciences were provided with large amounts of money over the years. And we have to admit, that President Nixon’s ‘War on Cancer’ is far from over. Needless to say, that the situation is the same everywhere in the Western World, it’s not just the USA.

Or do I just imagine all that? Is my wife’s cancer, my mother’s cancer and my own cancer just a coincidence or is there more to the picture. And what about the other ten people I know who also all got diagnosed in 2009.

A lot of people disagree with me. They point out that especially in the area of breast cancer the situation has gotten much better, by referring to new studies and statistical data. According to those voices, we have a lower number of new incidents and mortalities.

You don’t need a Ph. D. in Mathematics to read the numbers that were published in the recent years about cancer rates. The problem is: you can look at numbers in many different ways. It’s the way they are being presented to the public. So sometimes they can be perceived incorrectly.

There is no doubt that improvements were made over the years in the ‘War on Cancer’. However, I believe everybody would agree that we are far away from victory. There is still a lot more to do until the final battle is one.

I was diagnosed with Kidney Cancer and seven months later after my wife Ann was diagnosed with Breast Cancer in March of 2009. I created our Breast Cancer Homepage with the intention to share our the story of our breast cancer with you and to provide independent quality treatment information for breast cancer to you.