The 2010 Cancer Facts and Figures Report of the American Cancer Society shows substantial and encouraging progress in the five-year survival rate for all cancer diagnoses - 68 percent using the 1999-2005 baseline.

That is 18 percent higher than in a similar measure from 1975-77.

However, optimism is tempered by sobering death statistics from cancer: 569,540 Americans are expected to die from some form of the disease this year - 6,070 of them Mississippians.

As discouraging as that statistic is, it's significantly lower in actual numbers than 20 years ago. Death rates from cancer have fallen 21 percent in men in the measure comparing numbers from 1990 to 2006. The reduction was 12.3 percent among women.

The ACS says 767,000 deaths were avoided because of detection and treatment.

The incidence per 100,000 population, measured from 2002 to 2006, was 556.5 nationwide, but Mississippi was higher at 574.7.

Cancer incidence in Mississippi could be dramatically reduced or prevented with better personal health practice in two broad categories: obesity and tobacco use.

The ACS report places Mississippi in the middle of a cluster of Southern and South-Central states in which lung cancer deaths occur in the 85.4 to 107.6 per 100,000 category, ACS' highest, worst measure.

Mississippi and the same Southern states fall into the second-highest category of lung cancer incidence among women.

Smoking causes lung cancer in almost all cases. Eliminating smoking would eliminate the leading cause of cancers of the lung, bronchi, kidney and pancreas.

Smoking accounts for fully 30 percent of all cancer deaths and 87 percent of lung cancer deaths.

Mississippi leads the nation in the incidence of obesity, which is linked directly to increased risk for cancers of the kidney and pancreas. Pancreatic cancer's five-year survival rate is 6 percent.

However, as the general smoking rate has declined so has the rate of lung cancer. Campaigns against smoking have been notably but not uniformly successful.

Thousands of health former smokers are proof of success; thousands of tobacco-induced cancers prove the self-inflicted risk.

Mississippi sadly remains among the states with the highest percentage of adults who smoke: 22.7 percent compared to 18.3 percent nationwide.

Many of Mississippi's public health problems are related to two other negative factors: educational attainment and poverty, including the working poor.

Poor people are more likely to smoke, as are people who are undereducated, and both create an added statistical and personal risk for Mississippi's good-health measures.