When late US President Richard Nixon launched his “War on Cancer” in 1971, the ambition was audacious: find a cure within a decade. More than half a century later, cancer still claims nearly 10 million lives globally every year. Yet the world is inching toward a quieter, less headline-grabbing victory. It is doing so not through a singular cure, but through steady advances in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment that are transforming cancer into a disease many people can survive ~ or avoid altogether.

The clearest evidence of this transformation is in age-adjusted death rates. In the United States, those rates have fallen by roughly a third since the early 1990s, translating to an estimated 3 to 4 million fewer deaths. Similar declines have been recorded in over 140 countries. Adjusting for rising life expectancy, this means people today are significantly less likely to die of cancer at any given age than their parents were. Survival........

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