Your Odds Of Surviving Cancer Depend Very Much On Where You Live

In the United States, 9 out of 10 kids diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia will live. In Jordan, the survival rate is 16 percent.

And while cervical cancer patients have a five-year survival rate of over 70 percent in countries like Mauritius and Norway, the rate in Libya is under 40 percent.

That's the sobering news from the largest cancer study ever published. It surveyed more than 27 million patients and reveals a huge gulf in cancer survival worldwide.

But there's good news as well. "In most countries, survival from some of the commonest cancers has been improving," says Dr. Michel Coleman from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, one of the study's authors.

More people are surviving breast cancer, colon cancer and stomach cancer than ever before, especially in the U.S. and Europe. The survival rate for breast cancer in France and Finland, for example, is 87 percent. The data from other regions are also encouraging. Brazil's breast cancer survival rate has gone up from 78 percent in 1995-99 to 87 percent in 2005-09

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