Questão de Inglês com gabarito

IN 1971 RICHARD NIXON, then America's president, announced a "war on cancer". Just two years earlier the Apollo programme had combined big science and big government to put astronauts on the Moon, so hopes were high. Some optimistic doctors talked of a cure for cancer within a few years.

They were wrong. Today every adult has had cancer, knows someone who has, or both. Half of men and a third of women in rich countries can expect to suffer from it at some point in their lives. In America, where it is the second-most-common cause of death, just behind heart disease, it kills around 600,000 people a year. Worldwide, it is responsible for about one in six of all deaths. If your criterion for success was a cure within a decade – or even two or three or four – then you might conclude that the war on cancer has been lost.

In fact, things are better than many realise. The progress is plain from the data and there is every reason to think it will continue. Cancer is related to age. If you strip out longer lifespans, it becomes clear that in the rich world the early 1990s were an inflection point. Since then, the age-adjusted death rate has been falling, slowly but steadily, year after year. In America the rate is now about a third lower than in the 1990s. The trend is similar in other developed countries.

What some scientists hoped would be a blitzkrieg has turned out to be a steady but successful war of attrition. Some victories have been spectacular. Childhood leukaemia used to be virtually a death sentence; now it has a five-year survival rate above 90%. Yet because cancer is not one illness, but a whole category, much of the progress has come not from big breakthroughs, but thousands of smaller advances in screening, surgery and drugs.

Future gains will come from three main sources. Some will come by applying lessons from the rich world all across the globe. The overlooked success story in the fight against cancer has been prevention – perhaps because cancers that never happen are less visible than those that are cured. For example, smoking rates have plummeted in rich countries. That has probably prevented more than 3m cancer deaths since 1975 in America alone. Because smoking still causes one in five cancer deaths around the world, anti-tobacco drives in poor and middle-income countries, where smoking remains common, stand to do an enormous amount of good.

Another source of progress will be cheaper medicines and extra wealth to pay for them. Cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers in women. Almost all cases are the delayed side-effect of infection with the human papillomavirus (HPV), a bug. In 2008 Britain began offering a newly developed HPV vaccine to teenage girls. A decade and a half later, rates of cervical cancer among women in their 20s are down by 90%, and British health officials talk of virtually eradicating cervical cancer by 2040. The original HPV vaccine was relatively expensive. But a cheaper version developed in India now underpins a mass-vaccination campaign in that country, too.

Alongside the mainstays of surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy a new technique is emerging that harnesses the power of the immune system. The idea is to boost the body's own ability to attack cancerous cells. Some vaccines—perhaps genetically tailored to individual patients—can target a cancer that is already established. Others, acting more like broad vaccines used against diseases such as the flu, could target pre-cancerous cells. Vaccines of this sort for breast and colon cancer are in clinical trials.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/07/17/the-world-is-winning-the-war-on-cancer (adapted)

De acordo com o texto, o fator destacado como uma das principais formas de prevenção do câncer responsável por evitar milhões de mortes é