Cancer In the American society, cancer is the disease most feared by the majority of people within the U.S. Cancer has been known and described throughout history. In the early 1990s nearly 6 million cancer cases and more than 4 million deaths have been reported worldwide, every year. The most fatal cancer in the world is lung cancer, which has grown drastically since the spread of cigarette smoking in growing countries. Stomach cancer is the second leading form of cancer in men, after lung cancer. Another on the increase, for women, is breast cancer, particularly in China and Japan. The fourth on the list is colon and rectum cancer, which occurs mostly in older people. In the United States m