Week of June 9, 2026

From the publisher’s desk

Cancer has played a major role in my life.

Knock on wood, I haven’t dealt with cancer in my own body—other than a pre-cancerous mole that I had in middle school, which has led me to avoid prolonged sunlight exposure as much as I can—but it’s been a near-constant specter swirling around me. (Sadly, I know many of you can relate.) Throughout my adult life, my father battled a couple of different types of cancer, until lung cancer finally claimed him in 2012. Several of my dearest friends have died of cancer.

And given my family history, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before I do have to deal with it in my own body, in one way or another.

Because of all this, my heart sunk when I saw this Washington Post headline yesterday: “Cancer cases worldwide are expected to soar in the coming decades, a report finds. Here’s why.” It focused on a sobering new World Health Organization report.

Here’s the lede of that Washington Post piece:

Annual cancer cases are projected to rise considerably worldwide by 2050, according to a World Health Organization report on cancer published Wednesday. With its assessment, the United Nations body tempered optimism about improvements in cancer surveillance and treatment and warned that global health care inequities are driving further cases and deaths.

Around 20.6 million people were diagnosed with cancer in 2024, according to the findings. That number could reach 35 million a year by 2050.

The new cases will disproportionately appear in lower-income countries with poorer access to cancer surveillance and treatment, according to the report.

The news is not all bad—it’s just mostly bad.

The piece goes on to say.

The WHO projects that cancer incidence will increase by around 67 percent globally by 2050. That’s in line with predictions made in other recent reports.

The reasons for the increasing cancer rates are complex. Two key drivers the WHO’s report highlights are exposure to known risk factors, such as smoking and alcohol, and an aging population.

Experts have also cited improvements in cancer surveillance, which has allowed doctors to detect and diagnose more cancers than before.

In the United States, the rate of new cases has generally been stable in recent years, according to the National Institutes of Health. The WHO report predicts that cancer rates will increase in all regions across the world, though the biggest increases are projected in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean region.

One other bit of good news: Better treatments have helped more people survive cancer, for longer. But that also means a lot of people are enduring often painful and debilitating procedures.

I avoid profanities in this newsletter—the primary reason being that spam filters tend to dislike swear words—but I make one exception: Fuck cancer.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go apply some sunscreen.

—Jimmy Boegle, publisher/executive editor