The war on smoking is so interesting to me. It has been over a lifetime that the war has been occurring. The percentage of people smoking is a fraction of what it was. So you would assume lung cancer has been reduced similarly? It hasn't reduced for 30 years. Worse yet, the correlation between lung cancer and smoking inverted in around the 1980s-1990s. So antismoking 'evidences' are now split around that time.
For some reason and I don't know why, the data actually says you should start smoking to prevent lung cancer. Which sounds absolutely batshit crazy to me. Which is why it's so interesting. We misidentified what is causing the cancer and none of the obvious other possibilities are explaining it. Though the good news is stuff like radon or asbestos being eliminated has been a good thing.
Notice the clear dip. Yes there's a delay, but you don't develop lung cancer and die the next year. It often can take over a decade for lung cancer to kill you; but it does. If you get lung cancer, you will die. You virtually never survive. This also measures deaths, but right about the peaks there is when chemotherapy(methotrexate) and many other treatments for cancer started. So in fact, this graph is quite biased because it doesnt show tobbaco vs lung cancer. It shows chemotherapy working. Surely this graph should have been updated beyond 2000-2005? Why did they cut off there?
Why then does this one only go about 1990? Also who is smoking 25 cigarettes/day? And while getting lung cancer is practically certain death. At 25/day it only increases your risk by 25%? At only a couple cigarettes/day it's around only 5% increase risk? That's actually very bad correlation.
Why the cut off around 2002? What about 2002 makes these data? Wait why do spanish women basically not get lung cancer? In fact, despite all the antismoking advertisements and efforts. ~20% of spanish women still smoke today. https://www.statista.com/statistics/750687/proportion-of-dai...
In fact, yes there's a delay but there's clearly no improvement on US females despite drastically decrease smoking rates and significant increases medical science on how to fight cancer.
~50% of lung cancer is from people who never smoked. I know here in Canada it's rather difficult to find places to smoke and you virtually never get second hand smoke anymore. They used to assert it was second hand smoke like waitresses in smokey bars. However that can't be the explanation anymore.
We avoided some deaths relative to expectations but lung cancer deaths are actually going up since the 1980s? Up every year?
Now we know why so many graphs havent been updated since the 2000s. We have something like 500% tax on smoking and smoking 25 cigarettes/day can only be done by very wealthy people.
You might jump back and say, but surely tobacco smoke with 69 confirmed carcinogens/poisons is causing cancer to some amount?
But what is chemo? It's a poison that kills cancer because cancer tends to split dna more often and is vulnerable to being killed by poisons. Virtually any poison can be used, but the trick is finding something that won't kill you or do more harm. Anthrax can even be used to treat cancer. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12370003/
It seems what we discovered is that lung cancer was actually being killed by the toxic cigarette smoke. That the cause of lung cancer is something else and toxic tobacco smoke was actually helping some amount as a shitty chemotherapy. The antismoking folks know this and that's why all the graphs are cherry picked.
Also note; I'm not recommending to smoke lol. The somewhat recent discovery is that it's something else and we either don't know or aren't allowed to know for political reason.
For some reason and I don't know why, the data actually says you should start smoking to prevent lung cancer. Which sounds absolutely batshit crazy to me. Which is why it's so interesting. We misidentified what is causing the cancer and none of the obvious other possibilities are explaining it. Though the good news is stuff like radon or asbestos being eliminated has been a good thing.