National Cancer Institute

A state auditor's finding that a private contractor tampered with the numbers in the Family Health Administration's cancer registry has cast a new spotlight on the disease registries used to identify and address emerging threats to public health. Experts in the field say the patient data in the nation's various cancer registries are vital to their efforts to track trends and focus research and public education. But they also complain that there are no comparable national registries for a long list of public health problems of growing concern in the United States.

Maryland's top health official issued a call to arms against cancer yesterday, saying the state has mobilized resources needed to reduce its worst-in-the-nation cancer death rate but still has to persuade citizens to use them.Health Secretary Nelson J. Sabatini told 500 people gathered at the state's first "cancer summit" that laws making mammograms and Pap smears available at little or no cost to most state residents should have the effect of reducing deaths from breast and cervical cancers.

THE TRANSFORMED CELL: UNLOCKING THE MYSTERIES OF CANCER. Steven A. Rosenberg and John M. Barry. Putnam.343 pages. $24.95. Twenty-four years ago, Dr. Steven Rosenberg encountered the medical miracle that would direct the rest of his professional life.As a resident in surgery at the veterans' hospital in West Roxbury, Mass., he met a man who had been declared terminal 12 years earlier. Hospital records contained incontrovertible evidence that he had had widespread cancer. But there he was, not only alive but also cancer-free, having had no other treatment, and suffering from nothing more severe than gall bladder disease.

My mother thinks I have a sixth sense when it comes to calling her. It happened most recently when I called home from work one afternoon recently.The news from her end was that my father was in the hospital. The first thought that ran through my mind was that he had another job-related injury as had occurred in the past. His only recent hospitalizations had been for cataracts and cellulitis, and an infection from a cut or insect bite on his foot -- not very serious. Here was a 68-year-old man who didn't look his age, swam, went to the gym and passed a thorough physical examination a few months ago.But what he had this time was very serious indeed.

Ryan Hanley spent the summer before he turned 18 thinking about organizing a transcontinental bike ride to raise money for cancer. When he entered the Johns Hopkins University, he set about selling the idea and recruiting classmates and friends to ride 4,000 miles. The maiden effort that he had dubbed 4K for Cancer — which raised $80,000 in 2002 in memory of Hanley's father, who had died of cancer when Hanley was 13 — operated under the university's auspices for five years before becoming an independent nonprofit organization.

Last week, as Harriet Legum waited for her mammogram at the Johns Hopkins Imaging Center, she fumed about the latest pronouncement from the National Institutes of Health. Unable to confirm the life-saving value of routine mammograms for women in their 40s, an NIH panel said Thursday that these women should weigh the evidence and decide for themselves whether to have the test.A breast cancer survivor, Legum was furious that anyone -- let alone a prestigious national health organization -- would refuse to recommend regular mammograms for women in their 40s. Her frustration spoke for millions of American women who expect guidance from national experts and instead find confusion about whether mammograms will help save their lives.

When a woman receives a diagnosis of breast cancer, does her husband mask or admit his fear? If his wife must have a mastectomy, should he advocate for breast reconstruction? Must he listen patiently as his partner repeats the same concern for the umpteenth time? When his wife, Marsha Dale, a high school teacher, received a diagnosis of breast cancer in 2001, Marc Silver, an editor at U.S. News & World Report, had no primer for tackling such thorny questions. His initial response to her diagnosis was callous, Silver says.

CT scans can reduce deaths by 20 percent in older, heavy smokers by detecting tumors earlier, according to results released Thursday from an eight-year-long national study. The study, sponsored by the National Cancer Institute and launched in 2002, aimed to see if the tests, which are more sensitive than X-rays, would affect the outcomes for those with lung cancer, the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the country. The disease was estimated to have killed 159,390 people in 2009, according to the institute — more people than killed by breast, prostate, colon and pancreatic cancer combined.

INSPIRED BY the successes of the AIDS political-action movement, many Baltimore-area breast cancer survivors are working hard to make their disease become as public as it is painful.They have struggled through the lonely, private terrors of the newly diagnosed.They have gathered strength in the sheltering sorority of other breast cancer patients.Now they're ready to speak out to national audiences -- on a "Soundprint" radio series that begins Saturday and on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

In an isolated section of SmithKline Beecham medical laboratory in Owings Mills, three women pore over microscopes in search of misshapen nuclei. They work in silence, occasionally getting up from the desk to enter their findings in a nearby computer.Their mission: to locate abnormal cells, the detection of which can save a woman's life.Their job: one of the toughest in laboratory science.They are "reading" Pap smears, searching for cancer in cells scraped from a woman's cervix. Imagine trying to find a clump of squares in 20,000 round grains of sand poured on a desk, and you have an idea of what it's like.