Interactive Maps

Purpose: Provide maps of incidence and mortality statistics for use in assessing the burden and risk for a major cancer site for the US overall or for a selected state and its counties or parishes. The Healthy People 2010 objective for the US is provided in the legend when appropriate in order to give perspective on how favorably or unfavorably a location compares to this overall goal. The 95% Confidence Intervals for the rates provide a measure of how certain or uncertain the point estimates are and can be used to generally assess how different a rate is from another.

Cancer statistics require careful interpretation. See the information page about interpret rankings for insight into interpreting cancer statistics particularly if you are a new user of cancer statistics.

There are many possible explanations for geographic variations in cancer rates including differences in lifestyles, medical care availability and delivery systems, screening practices, reporting practices, environmental exposures, etc. Elevated rates in some areas may also be due to chance, particularly for relatively rare cancers and in areas with small populations. For more information on geographic variations and cancer clusters, see http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/Risk/clusters and http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/clusters/about_clusters.htm

The Quick Reference Guide provides an introduction to the interactive features of this section

Data Sources:

• Mortality data are provided by the National Vital Statistics System at the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
• Population counts for denominators in the calculation of rates and trends are provided to the National Cancer Institute by the U.S. Census Bureau and use the National Center for Health Statistics file needed to bridge from the Census 2000 multiple race coding to historical groupings of race and ethnicity.
• Rates are calculated using SEER*Stat.
• Incidence data are provided by the National Program of Cancer Registries Cancer Surveillance System (NPCR-CSS), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and by the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) Program.
• Incidence rates are not available for some combinations of geography, cancer site, race and age. Please see the data not available page for more information.