Sentinel lymph node dissection has really changed the way that we manage breast cancer, melanoma.

Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma,

The highest rate is that of trachea cancer, bronchitis and lung cancer, followed by skin cancers (without melanoma), breast cancer and stomach cancer.

Excluding non melanoma skin cancers, there were 88,398 new cancer cases (337.6 per 100,000 ) and 36,319 deaths due to cancer in Australia (127.3 per 100,000 ) in 2001.

I was also doing cancer research, immune based therapies for melanoma, to be specific, and in that world I was actually taught to question everything, to challenge all assumptions and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards.

Last year, a record 61 drugs were introduced worldwide, compared with an annual average of 34 in the previous decade. More than 40 of these treatments were for rare or difficult to treat conditions, including hepatitis C, meningococcal B, and metastatic melanoma.

In females, breast cancer (11,791 cases, or 93.1 per 100,000 population ) is the most common registrable cancer, followed by colorectal cancer (5,883), melanoma (3,861) and lung cancer (2,891), in total, they account for 60 per cent of all registrable cancers in females.

But our dramatic progress in detecting and treating cancer has also led to growing awareness of the problem of tumor dormancy a patient appears to be cured, only to have the same cancer return years or even decades later. In breast cancer or melanoma, for example, recurrences 25 years after initial treatment have been reported.