Dr. Jospeh Fraumeni, a pioneering researcher of epidemiology, died a couple of weeks ago. Among his achievements were the first maps of cancer deaths in the United States. Here are two early maps.
These maps eventually became an atlas of cancer mortality published by the National Cancer Institute. You can see the entire atlas here but be warned, it’s huge and may take a long time to load.
The atlas maps begin with overall maps, broken down by race and gender before breaking them down further by types of cancer.
There is a bias in that there are many more maps showing white people than black and no other races (or genders) are accounted for. Anyway it is interesting to see the male/female contrasts here-above is white male, below white female.
One difference that really stands out is “cancer alley” in Louisiana. Are males contracting cancer at work, where presumably there are fewer females employed in these chemical industries? Similar disparities appear in coastal parts of Georgia, the Carolinas and Texas. Here are the maps for blacks. Notice the they do not have the finer county breakdown, nor is there data for the earlier 1950-69 time period.
All of these maps show a similar pattern of lower rates in the southeast and southwest. You can see more, including interactive and story maps at gis.cancer.gov. Here is a sample from the urban-rural disparity story map. I manipulated this image slightly so the legend and map appear together.
This quote from the gis.cancer site summarizes Dr Fraumeni's ideas that led to developing these maps. “The spatial context in which people live is an important factor in cancer etiology and outcomes influencing a person’s risk of developing cancer, accessibility and quality of preventive and treatment services, and quality of life after surviving cancer.“
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