It doesn’t seem jolly but last Friday, it was the World Cancer Day. About this, the WHO set up a nice website about cancer control.

Following my previous post on Jamie Oliver and the top 15 causes of death in the USA, I started to collect similar data from other countries. Linking this to cancers, the annual statistics on cancers in Belgium can be found on the Belgian Cancer Registry. The latest numbers are however from 2006. Here are the top 15 cancers in Belgium in 2006 (all sexes and regions mixed):

Rank	Classification	Cancer type	Cases	Remark
1.	C50	Breast	9556
2.	C61	Prostate	9254	male only
3.	C34	Bronchus and lung	6956
4.	C18	Colon	5233
5.	C44	Malignant neoplasms of skin	3110
6.	C20	Rectum	2264
7.	C67	Bladder	1986
8.	C82-85	Non-Hodgkin-lymphom	1925
9.	C43	Malignant melanoma of skin	1572
10.	C64	Kidney	1377
11.	C16	Stomach	1356
12.	C54	Corpus uteri	1320	female only
13.	C25	Pancreas	1172
14.	C80	Unknown primary site	1168
15.	C15	Oesophagus	920

It’s interesting to note a few things:

• These figures represent cases of cancer and not deaths by cancer. Note also that prostate cancer is in third position but only concerns males.
• The latests data is from 2006. The website doesn’t seem to be updated since 2008 (and 2008 seems to be the year when data from 2006 are available ; if we follow the 2-years-gap logic, I guess the data from 2009 are available somewhere but not on this website)
• Data accessibility seems to be average. Data is there in Excel format (and PDF which is pretty useless if you want to reuse the data). On one side, these Excel files can be opened by almost every office suite. On the other side, some open format would have been preferred. And some direct interaction with the data on the website is now the norm (ok, I just wrote it doesn’t seem to be updated since 2008)
• The classification is quite good since it uses the “Classification Internationale des Maladies” which is the “International Classification of Diseases” in English better known as ICD-10 (online).

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