Elizabeth Ward Cancer Quotations

People have still not fully gotten the message that the most important things that they can do to avoid cancer are to avoid tobacco smoking and maintain a healthy body weight and physical activity.

While we have so much information about changes that would be necessary to decrease the risk of cancer and other chronic diseases, it's not clear how to change society and change policy to help those changes take place. It's disturbing that we have so much information now but we haven't really achieved the social will to make the kinds of changes that would need to be made to really impact tobacco smoking and the trends of increasing overweight and obesity.

The factors that contribute to cancer and the factors that help to prevent cancer and detect it early don't change overnight. This reflects that we have a great deal of knowledge about certain major causes of cancer and major preventative actions that people can take and these still need to take hold.

We do have fairly high rates of screening for breast cancer and cervical cancer. I think that is having a very positive impact on mortality rates for those diseases.

African-American women have twice the mortality rate from cervical cancer as white women. Researchers need to investigate how those differences are related to socioeconomic status.