TPM:
Is the central claim in Rudy Giuliani's latest ad — that prostate cancer patients in Britain have only a 44% five-year survival rate — actually true? According to ABC News, the claim in the new ad came from a single article in a free-marketeer magazine, published eight years ago, which did not include a citation.
According to official statistics from the British government, the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer diagnoses was 74.4% from 1999-2003, and it's rising to meet the American rate of 82%.
Insofar as there is a difference, as Ezra Klein explains, it comes from years of publicity in the United States geared towards encouraging men to get examined, and to thus catch the cancer early. In fact, both countries have roughly the same percentage of men who die of prostate cancer, but many more American men are diagnosed with relatively benign forms of it — thus inflating the survival rate.
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