But an analysis involving average doctors in New Hampshire found they were missing more than one in four cancers.
The virus has been detected in tumor cells from people with the four cancers that develop in rodents.
These four cancers saw an 11 per cent drop in death rates for the period studied.
The report, from the National Cancer Institute, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Cancer Society and the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries, found a decline in death rates from all four cancers since 1990.
It also describes previously unrecognised diseases, including four cancers, in red squirrels, which have been under increasing pressure from greys, introduced from America in the 19th century, and squirrelpox, a virus greys can carry without symptoms.
Taking breast cancer as an example, there are likely to be three or four cancers for every 1000 women screened in North America (Gur et al., 2004; Lee, Bhargavan-Chatfield, Burnside, Nagy, & Sickles, 2016).
These four cancers account for almost half the total cancer deaths among men and women.
Those four cancers will continue to account for the four largest groups of male cancer survivors in 2024, the report authors predict.
The fixed effects model was used for the meta-analysis of these four cancers.
Synergistic effects of alcohol and smoking were analyzed for four cancers in individual studies.
