The Canadian Cancer Society announced Thursday that Nova Scotia still has the highest cancer incidence rates in the country and an estimated 900 Prince Edward Islanders will be diagnosed with cancer this year, and 360 will die from the disease.

The bleak news however is offset by some good news that the survival rate for all cancers in this province has improved by 4.5 % over the past decade, up to 62 %.

Maureen Summers, executive director of the society’s Nova Scotia division, said this year alone 6,000 new cancer diagnoses and 2,700 deaths from the disease are expected here. She said that Nova Scotians need to do more to maintain healthy lifestyles and that more population-based cancer research is needed to better understand these figures.

Repeating a telling quote she once heard she said, “Cancer statistics are people with the tears wiped away.”

Although the numbers are higher the risk of getting cancer during one’s lifetime remains the same.

Dawn Binns, executive director of the P.E.I. division of the cancer society said, "So what we're seeing is the actual number of cases is increasing, but our population is aging and it's growing. So that's a big factor in that."

The reason fewer people are dying of cancer is due to better screening and better drugs to treat the disease Binns added.

"When we look at incidence rates, those are either stable or declining, depending on the type of cancer. So there is a good news story. We're not, as individuals, developing more cancer; we just have more cases of it."

According to the 2009 Canadian Cancer Statistics, about 40 % of Canadian women and 45 % of men will develop cancer during their lifetimes, while about one in four in this country will die from the disease.

The society said P.E.I. women continue to have high rates of colorectal and lung cancer, while men have high rates of prostate, lung, bladder and kidney cancer. Both sexes have rates of melanoma skin cancer higher than the national average.

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