Sir: Though many diseases (such as heart failure) may have a worse prognosis than most cases of cancer, cancer is the subject of widespread fear and taboos. The euphemism ‘after a long illness’ is still commonly used, reflecting an apparent stigma. This deep belief that cancer is necessarily a difficult and usually deadly disease is reflected in the systems chosen by society to compile cancer statistics: the most common form of cancer — non-melanoma skin cancers, accounting for about one-third of cancer cases worldwide, but very few deaths — are excluded from cancer statistics specifically because they are easily treated and almost always cured, often in a single, short, outpatient procedure. Cancer is regarded as a disease that must be ‘fought’ to end the ‘civil insurrection’; a War on Cancer was declared in the US. Military metaphors are particularly common in descriptions of cancer’s human effects and they emphasize both the state of the patient’s health and the need to take immediate, decisive actions himself, rather than to delay, to ignore, or to rely entirely on others. The military metaphors also help rationalize radical, destructive treatments. In the last 25 years, Pakistan had witnessed a significant increase in number of cases of various kinds of cancers and the threat claimed not less than 100,000 lives in 2015. The number of deaths from cancers particularly from lung cancer in males and breast cancer in females is also on the rise in the country. Studies reveal that every year, nearly 300,000 new cases of various kinds of cancer, reported from across the country. At least one-third to forty percent of all cancer cases are preventable.Colorectal cancer is the fourth most prevalent and fifth most commonly diagnosed cancer in Pakistan, with an estimated 5-year prevalence of 11,917 (3.5 percent) cases, 5,335 (3.6 percent) newly diagnosed cases and 3,903 (3.9 percent) deaths occurring in 2012 according to Global cancer statistics, 2012. One idea about why people with cancer are blamed or stigmatized, called the just-world hypothesis, is that blaming cancer on the patient’s actions or attitudes allows the blamers to regain a sense of control. This is based upon the blamers’ belief that the world is fundamentally just and so any dangerous illness, like cancer, must be a type of punishment for bad choices, because in a just world, bad things would not happen to good people. In 2007, the overall costs of cancer in the US — including treatment and indirect mortality expenses (such as lost productivity in the workplace) — was estimated to be $226.8 billion. In 2009, 32 percent of Hispanics and 10 percent of children 17 years old or younger lacked health insurance; “uninsured patients and those from ethnic minorities are substantially more likely to be diagnosed with cancer at a later stage, when treatment can be more extensive and more costly.” DR ZEESHAN KHAN Via E-mail Published in Daily Times, February 25th 2018.