Many news reports about health -- whether they focus on diet, exercise or your habits -- touches on one of the scariest tersm in medicine: Cancer.

When people hear "the C word," they imagine patients wasting away in a hospital bed, bodies ravaged by disease and bald-headed from the drugs and radiation that can be used to treat it.

Those tragic endings are reality for some, but cancer also leaves many survivors.

According to The American Cancer Society, the estimated cancer prevalance in the U.S. for 2004 was 10.3 million.

That means there were 10.3 million people alive who had been diagnosed with some form of cancer at some point.

This number differs from the rate of incidence, which is how often a disease is diagnosed over a certain time period. Prevalence and incidence are not the same, in part because if a cancer has a higher mortality rate, the prevalence level will drop because fewer people who have had that type of cancer are alive.

An estimate from 2004 found that 10.3 million people in the U.S. -- out of more than 300 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau -- have been diagnosed with cancer.

The most prevalent form of cancer is in the breast, with more than 2.4 million cases, including 12,000 in men.

But a form of cancer that can only affect men, prostate cancer, was the second most prevalant, with almost 2.2 million cases.

A 2006 report from the American Cancer Society said that about one-third of the expected 564,000 cancer deaths that year could be prevented. They are forms related to nutrition, physical inactivity and obesity, not to mention 170,000 cancers tied to tobacco use.

Despite advances in medicine and warnings about cancer, about 1,500 people a day still die from its various forms, according to a report.

But there is good news. The five-year survival rate for cancers diagnosed between 1995 and 2001 was 65 percent, up from 50 percent in 1974-1976.

While better medicines and care may be part of that, increases in rates and sensitivity of screening could also be a factor; the earlier a cancer is seen, the longer someone can survive a diagnosis, whether it is treated or not.

So while cancer can be a frightening and misunderstood set of diseases, evidence shows that it can be beaten in many cases.