It seems that a person is considered cured of cancer if they live for five years after it was first diagnosed. If the same cancer is becomes active again, even a year before you die, and your death occurs five years and one day after it was first diagnosed, you are counted as cured.
I believe the article I was reading was about the US reducing the life after diagnosis years from seven to five so our statistics would be more in line with what the Europeans were using.
Statistics don't lie, but statisticians (and the politician that use them) do.
I believe what you say is true, but the trend is there nonetheless.
You are spot on with the 5 year survival concept. The newer
technologies that identify the cancers earlier increase the number of people with a six year survival rate. The six year survivors then die and radically alter the statistics without
improving the annual per capita death rate at all. The best example of this is: the breast cancer death rate in 1935 was 35 per 100,000. 60 years later the 1995 the breast cancer death rate was still 35 per 100,000. All of the treatment efforts over the sixty year period did nothing to alter the breast cancer
death rate.