Now consider the counties in which the incidence of kidney cancer is highest. These ailing counties tend to be mostly rural, sparsely populated, and located in traditionally Republican states in the Midwest, the South, and the West. Tongue-in-cheek, Wainer and Zwerling comment: “It is easy to infer that their high cancer rates might be directly due to the poverty of the rural lifestyle—no access to good medical care, a high-fat diet, and too much alcohol, too much tobacco.” Something is wrong, of course. The rural lifestyle cannot explain both very high and very low incidence of kidney cancer.
