New cancer cases and deaths have started to decline for the first time in both American men and women since the US declared a war on cancer in 1971, according to the latest annual report that tracks the illness.

According to it, overall cancer death rates decreased an average of 1.8 percent a year from 2002 to 2005. Another encouraging news was that the number of new cases of cancer also fell, by an average of 0.8 percent a year from 1999 to 2005.

The report was published in the Dec. 3 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Every year, the American Cancer Society, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US national Cancer Institute and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries release such a report since 1998, the first year when such a report was done.

The decrease in both new cancer cases and deaths suggest the pay-off from improvements in detection and treatment of cancer are now being matched by dividends from prevention, said Otis Brawley, medical director of the American Cancer Society.

“It is a significant milestone. The take-home message is that many of the things we’ve been telling people to do to be healthy finally reached the point where we can say that they are working. These things are really starting to pay off,” Brawley said.

Report co-author Dr. Ahmedin Jemal, director of the American Cancer Society's Cancer Occurrence Office said the results could have been better if all Americans had had medical insurance.

“If we were to insure all Americans to have access to care, then we could have applied cancer prevention and treatment to all segments of the population,” he said.

The report found that from 1999 to 2005, the rate for all cancers among men and women dropped 0.8 percent a year. Among men the drop was 1.8 percent a year and for women it was 0.6 percent annually. Decline was highly visible in the five of the six most common cancers – lung, colorectal and prostate in men and breast and colorectal cancer in women.

Jemal said that the findings are also the results of many Americans quitting the noxious habit of smoking. However, there are still 43 million Americans still smoking and statistics showed that smoking is the single most preventable cause of cancer. “A third of all cancers are due to smoking,” Jemal said. He also added that, another factor in 15 to 20 percent of all cancer cases, obesity appears to have reached record levels lately, and this could translate into an increase in the number of cancers in the following years.

Annually, about 1.4 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer and an estimated 560,000 die from it.

The researchers fear that the economic meltdown may trigger a new increase in cancer cases, as fewer people feel comfortable paying for screening tests and increased stress leads some people to resume smoking.