Environmental epidemiology of malignancies. The central European perspective

The epidemiology of tumour diseases is one of the basic fields of non-infectious epidemiology. When in the first half of this century the most serious infections had been put under control in Europe and North America other kinds of diseases such as carcinomas emerged. Incidence of these diseases seem to be epidemical, exactly in those parts of the world. Carcinomas have been recorded as the second largest group of death causes nowadays. Despite frequent efforts to refer to the tumour diseases as the civilisation evils, we have to weigh critically the opinion that malignant tumours are the privilege of industrial countries whereas the primitive nations have recorded these types of diseases rarely. The Cancer Register in Mengo Hospital, Kampala, of 1897-1956 and other evidence have failed to confirm the lower cancer incidence in the local population at the beginning of the colonisation period than it was in Europe of that time. The paleopathological analysis of skeletal relicts in Central Europe burial places during the ceramic volute era near Stuttgart, Germany, have proved the total proportion of over 10% of traces indicating the presence of tumours in the available complete skeletons. The authors discuss the epidemiology of cancer, risk factors and chances of prevention.