I’m working on the CONCORD programme on global surveillance of cancer survival which is collecting data from 279 cancer registries worldwide from 67 countries. In total we receive data from individual records of about 26 million cancer patients. The patients were diagnosed during 1995-2009 and followed up to 2009. We estimated five year survival for all these countries. We had ten cancer sites, so the difference depends on the cancer that we were considering. We saw an increased survival for breast and colorectal cancer in most developed countries while unfortunately survival for liver and lung cancer was poor, both in developed and in developing countries. Survival was very high in Southeast Asia, mainly in Japan, Korea and Taiwan and in the same area leukaemia, both in adults and children, was low, very low compared to the estimates worldwide.

They were published last week in The Lancet and the good news is that the article is open access so everyone can download both the article and the web appendices that are reporting results by country and registry for all these 67 countries.