Recent reports suggest the fact that the death count due to cancer rises in China with every year. In 2015, nearly 2.8 million deaths were accounted by cases of cancer inside the country alone – and that accounted for nearly one fifth of the worldwide deaths that occurred during the entirety of last year. 2.8 million deaths in a year translate into nearly 7,500 deaths on a daily basis over the length of 2015.

However, this is hardly news for the Chinese populace as the country has been dealing with the increasing mortality rate due to cancer for nearly 6 years. The most common forms of cancer seem to be lung cancer, gastric cancer, liver and esophageal cancers – forms that are hardly prominent in other countries, such as the United States; here, the aforementioned forms only sum up to be roughly 20% of the cases. In China, they represent 57% of the total cases of cancer.

The reason behind this the ghastly number of lung cancer incidents goes deep within other issues that the country is currently facing. It is common knowledge that China is facing one of the worst cases of air pollution in the entire world. On top of that, the second reason behind the great number of occurrences is also the large percentile of smokers in the populace.

A research led by author Dr. Chen Wanqing has concluded that most cancer occurrences in the Chinese population are created by air pollution, while most of the preventable cancers are the result of bad habits such as smoking – which can manifest as lung or stomach cancer, and even spreads to both in some cases.

As terrifying as the cancer-inflicted death count in China was in 2015, it doesn’t even come close to the fact that 4.3 million new cancer cases were found in the country over the past 12 months. The cancer cases seem to be diagnosed in men at as much as a 2:1 ratio in comparison to women and are 10% more likely to occur in rural places.

For example, out of all the deaths recorded in 2015, 165.9 cases were recorded in males versus 88.8 in females for every 100,000 citizens in rural areas. Urban areas scored 149 male cases versus 109.5 female cases for every 100,000 citizens – a worrying increase in exposure to the latter category.

While air pollution is the most well-known and worrying factor that leads to cancer cases in China, smoking only coming in second, the issue spreads to even more worrying factors such as soil and water contamination.

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