Screenings have cut cancer rates, but there’s a lot of work to be done when it comes to awareness, disparities, and vaccines, author Bruce Ratner says.
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JOHN WHYTE Welcome, everyone. I'm Dr. John Whyte, the Chief Medical Officer at WebMD. And you're watching Cancer in Context.
Despite many advances in cancer, it remains a leading cause of death. Over 600,000 people die each year, but nearly 2 million people are diagnosed, many at late stages. My guest today, Bruce Ratner, says we aren't adequately addressing this. He has a new book out entitled Early Detection-- Catching Cancer When it's Curable. Bruce, welcome to Cancer in Context.
BRUCE RATNER Well, thank you for having me.
JOHN WHYTE Thanks for joining me.
BRUCE RATNER I'm delighted to be here, really. Thank you. It's such an important topic. And so I'm so glad to be able to talk about it.
JOHN WHYTE You dedicate your book to your older brother, Michael. Tell us his story.
BRUCE RATNER I almost get tears in my eyes when I talk about it, but I want to talk about it.
JOHN WHYTE You had a very close relationship.
BRUCE RATNER So my brother and I were very close. We grew up together. He's a year and a half older-- he was a year and a half older than me and in perfect health.
And one day I was out of town, and he called me and said, I've been sick to my stomach. I'm going to go to the emergency room. He goes to the emergency room. They go and do an MRI or a CAT scan and they find he has metastatic brain cancer, meaning it came from somewhere else.
And he died within 8 months. And he was at MSK. And they did a great job of keeping him alive for 8 months. And I'm grateful for that. But that got me into thinking, wait a minute, how come we can't catch this earlier?
And then on top of that, my mother died of cancer when I was 28 years old. My sister-in-law died of cancer when she was 42. And my grandmother-- I had one grandparent-- died when I was 5. And I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember thinking to myself something really incredible. She goes, I was five. And I said, I'm not going to get this disease. In 50 years, it'll be cured. I was wrong.
JOHN WHYTE Your brother, your mother, your grandmother-- there's a lot of good chapters in this book, but there's a particular sentence that I want to read back to you that you wrote. I even marked it for me.
BRUCE RATNER Good for you. Great.
JOHN WHYTE You say, "I write of my family history not because it's special or unique, but because it's not."
BRUCE RATNER Correct. And that's exactly right. What I've just said to you has happened to so many families. It is unbelievable. Almost everybody has somebody either in their family or close friend, sibling, or could be father, mother, grandparent, who has died of cancer.
And it's going to get worse because we're aging. And by 2040 or so or 2050, we're going to have double the numbers. And so this is something that happens to every-- the story is not because it's about me. It's about everybody.
JOHN WHYTE You spend a lot of time talking about disparities. And the viewers could say, you and John are Caucasian men, right? That's not what we're talking about here primarily. Why are you interested in issues of disparities when it comes to cancer prevention particularly?
BRUCE RATNER So I had parents who cared a lot about human rights and civil rights. My brother was a very famous human rights lawyer. And all my life, right out of law school, instead of going to a big law firm, I went to work for the city on poverty law. And I cared deeply about everybody.
And African-Americans, the best example is African-American women get breast cancer at the same incidence numbers diagnosed with cancer, the same as white people, but 40% higher mortality. That's just crazy. That doesn't make any sense. And actually, I get upset by it and angry about it because that isn't right.
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