Cancer has always been figured out uniquely in the diseases of mankind. For centuries people spoke of it only in whispers, or they never spoke about it at all, as if the disease were not only dreadful but somehow shameful as well. Today, the picture is changing and changing very rapidly.

This decade may see the time-undreamt of only scant years ago-when half of those stricken by cancer will survive its ravages. Thanks to advanced clinical research made today, cancer cures are available.

But in context, the picture is not as bleak as it might seem. At the beginning of the twentieth century, survival from cancer was relatively rare. At the end of the 1930\'s, the five-year survival rate (alive after five years) was one in five or fewer. Ten years later it had shot up to one in four, and in the mid-fifties to one in three.

This figure has remained relatively stable because the survival rate for some of the more widespread cancers has leveled off despite the best efforts of physicians to devise better forms of treatment. For such cancers, which include those of the breast, colon, and rectum, improvements will come through earlier detection and even prevention.

Considerable progress is being made on many fronts in the war against cancer. It ranges from advances in early detection to breakthroughs in treatment. Cancer can strike at any age, although it is most common in people over 50. The past 25 years have seen a 50 percent dip in the death rate from cervical cancer, mostly because of increasing acceptance of the Pap test, which can detect the disease at a very early stage.

At the same time, children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, which used to be invariably fatal in weeks or months, have benefited from new therapies, with at least half now surviving three years, some more than five years, and a few on the verge of being pronounced cured.

Similar advances in the treatment of a cancer of the lymph system called Hodgkin\'s disease have improved the five-year survival rate from 25 percent at the end of World War II to about 55 percent today.

Cancer would surely be easier to detect and treat if it were a single entity with a single simple cause. But it is not. Experts agree that there are actually some 200 different diseases that can be called cancers. Two in five people, at some point in their lives, are susceptible to it.

They have different causes, originate in different tissues, develop for different reasons and in different ways, and demand vastly different kinds of treatment. All have one fatal element in common, however; in every case, normal cells have gone wild and lost their growth and development controls.

Various types of cancer behave very differently. For example, cancer of the liver and cancer of the stomach are very different diseases. They grow at different rates and react to different treatments. That is why depending on the type of the disease, cancer cures are used alone or in combination. That is, to either control the growth of cancer cells or to entirely eliminate the disease.