Is lung cancer more prevalent in asia and eastern europe, for example, than in the us?

It seems to be, based on looking inside their bodies. I saw both the Bodies Revealed exhibit, and the Body Worlds exhibit last year. Both are displays of plastinated bodies. Essentially, Bodies Revealed is the Chinese knock-off of Body Worlds (the original German). When the internal organs were present in the Chinese bodies, the lungs were blackened without exception. There was a disturbing display of lungs which compared healthy lungs with a smoker’s lungs and a coal miner’s lungs. While the smoker’s lungs were black and shriveled, the coal miner’s lungs looked like blocks of coal. Most of the lungs in the Chinese bodies looked somewhere in between the smoker’s and miner’s lungs.

The answer is “Yes”, but China has massive air pollution and they’re ignoring it & blaming it on smoking.

I agree that it is not just the smoking, @psyla. The lungs I saw were more damaged than just smoking, and not everyone smokes.

The countries with the highest incidence rates (8–10%) for lung cancer in Europe are in increasing order:

Latvia
Czech Republic
Estonia
Slovakia
Russian Fed.
Belarus
Belgium
Croatia
Poland
Hungary

I found the following in the book “Lung Cancer- Principles and Practice”:

“The areas with the highest incidence and morality were in Eastern European, North America, Australia and New Zealand, and South America. The Rates in China, Japan and Southeast Asia were moderately high, while the lowest rates were observed in southern Asia, India and Pakistan, as well as in most countries in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Edit: That should be “mortality”, not “morality” in the above quote.