In 1971 President Nixon declared war on cancer and increased the federal funds allocated to cancer research dramatically. Thirty years later, many have declared this war a failure. Overall cancer statistics confirm this view: age-adjusted mortality in 2000 was essentially unchanged from the...

Competing risks models are fundamentally unidentified. This paper derives bounds for aspects of the underlying distributions under a number of different assumptions. These bounds are then applied to mortality data from the US. We find that trends in cancer show much larger improvements than was...