I think you and the news article are thinking of different statistics. The metric described in the news article is deaths by cancer per 100,000 individuals. W

I think you and the news article are thinking of different statistics. The metric described in the news article is deaths by cancer per 100,000 individuals. What you calculated is the percentage of deaths due to cancer. I don't have access to the scientific article that was the foundation of this news piece but it looks like the reduction in death rate was not the authors' main point [1]. [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24890451 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24890451