Why do some county rates seem high?
Sometimes the cancer rate in a county is high one year and low the next. This may occur because the number of county residents is small and only a few cases of a particular cancer occur there each year. A change of one or two cases more, or one or two cases less, may have a large effect on the cancer rate for a small county. In counties where this may be an issue, we have marked them on the graph with a star (*).
