Question: why do more people seem to be geting cansa?

Alexis Barr answered on 18 Jun 2013:

This is a very good question and one we talk about a lot. One simple reason is that people are living longer. Since cancer is caused by getting several mutations in your DNA, the chance of getting more mutations increases the longer you live.
The other thing is that we are better at detecting cancer now than we were which means the numbers of cancer cases seem higher. We have better tests for things like breast, prostate and cervical cancer. This means that we can now diagnose and treat people with cancer. Before, these people would have died without us knowing that they had cancer in many cases.