Report: Cancer rate decreases in U.S. blacks

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Cancer rates are falling among U.S. blacks, but African-Americans are still dying of cancer at much higher rates than whites, the American Cancer Society said on Wednesday.

The incidence of newly diagnosed cancers among African Americans fell from 1993 to 1997 for the first time in 20 years, the organization said. The death rate for cancer for blacks fell between 1991 and 1997, reversing a 30-year trend.

"Despite this progress, the incidence rate for all cancers combined among African-American men remains 27 percent higher and the death rate remains 45 percent higher than among white men in 1997," the Cancer Society said in a statement. "The cancer death rate for African-American women was 22 percent higher than for white women."

Black men have a 60 percent higher rate of prostate cancer than white men do and their death rate from prostate cancer is double that of white men, the group said in a report on cancer facts and figures for African-Americans.

"African-American women continue to have a higher death rate from breast cancer than white women despite lower breast cancer incidence rates," the group said. "Five-year relative survival rates remain poorer for African-Americans than for whites for each of the four most common cancers, breast, colorectal, lung, and prostate."

It said there are many reasons that blacks have higher cancer death rates than whites. U.S. blacks are more likely to smoke, to be obese, to avoid exercise, and they are less likely to get screening tests such as colonoscopies and mammograms.

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