Cancer is a sign
of a long life.
against 2.9% in Central African Republic
That gap is not a verdict on Danish oncology. Cancer is mostly a disease of age, and in Central African Republic too few people reach the age at which it strikes — they die earlier, of other things. Across 185 countries, what a population dies of says less about how good its hospitals are than about how long its people get to live.
Two worlds
The single largest cause of death in each country, 2021.
Two causes split the world almost evenly. Where heart disease leads, people have lived long enough to wear out; where infections, childbirth and newborn conditions lead, many never got that far. Infections account for 2.6% of deaths in Finland and 66.4% in Chad.
The clock, not the wallet
Each dot is a country: life expectancy (2020) against the share of deaths from cancer (2021). 184 countries, correlation +0.85.
azenha.ai/bulldozer
Richer countries have more cancer deaths too (correlation with income +0.78), but income and longevity move together, so the question is which one is doing the work. Hold income constant and cancer still tracks life expectancy strongly (+0.59). Hold life expectancy constant and the link to income almost disappears (+0.26). Money matters to the cancer share only insofar as it buys years.
Heart disease is not the rich world’s disease
Median share of deaths by income decile, poorest (1) to richest (10), GDP per capita PPP 2021.
Cancer climbs with income almost without a break, from 5.3% to 25.0%. Cardiovascular disease does not: it peaks in decile 8 at 32.5% and falls back among the richest. The world’s highest shares are in Bulgaria (54.9%), Uzbekistan (53.5%), Ukraine (52.8%) — upper-middle-income countries where people live long enough for the heart to fail, but where prevention and treatment lag. In Japan 28.4%, Norway 25.0%, Switzerland 28.6%, it is well below that. Dementia and other neurological causes follow the rich-world pattern most sharply: a median of 2.9% of deaths in decile 8, 10.6% in decile 10.
Where we know least
WHO grades each country’s death-registration data from 1 (complete) to 4 (none usable). Share of the population of the 185 countries, 2021.
For 74 countries, home to 65% of these people — India and China among them — the shares on this page are WHO’s modelled estimates, not counted deaths. 48 of 54 African countries are in that group. And the countries where registration is weakest are the ones where people die youngest: average life expectancy is 78.1 years in grade-1 countries and 66.8 in grade-4 countries. Part of the pattern above is therefore a property of the model that fills the gaps. It is the best estimate there is, and it is labelled as such on every dataset page.
What the clock does not explain
Diabetes has no income gradient at all (correlation +0.00). Its map is mostly islands: Fiji 18.1%, Mauritius 15.1%, Tonga 13.8%, against 0.3% in Ukraine. Something other than age or wealth draws that map. Diet and genetics are the usual suspects, and nothing in these numbers settles which.
Source: WHO Global Health Estimates 2021; life expectancy from Gapminder, income and population from IMF WEO. Medians of an even-sized group average the two middle values. Explore the data →