Dear friends,

For the past 50 years, the Iowa Cancer Registry has served the state of Iowa and the nation as a trusted source for high-quality cancer data. In addition to its vital role as Iowa’s statewide cancer registry, the ICR has been a member of the National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program, representing U.S. rural and Midwestern populations since its inception in 1973. In that time, the Iowa registry has been recognized nationally for excellence in timeliness, completeness, and quality of data.

Five decades of tracking cancer cases, survival rates, and deaths from cancer have built the Iowa Cancer Registry into an indispensable public health resource, one that is “changing the way we identify, diagnose, and treat cancer, and how we care for and support the ever-growing population of those who have survived a cancer diagnosis,” notes Mary Charlton, the registry’s director and associate professor of epidemiology in the UI College of Public Health.  

The 50^th anniversary of the Iowa Cancer Registry serves to remind us of the critical importance of public health data generally, as well as the sustained public investments required to make these resources a reality, the cooperative relationships that support the collection of records, and the specialized skills needed to manage these data effectively for the public good.

This milestone is a reminder, too, of the different types of data that public health researchers and practitioners are increasingly working to generate to understand the complexity of people’s lived experiences and inform effective health interventions. Augmenting long-standing strengths in quantitative methods, College of Public Health investigators today are leading development of qualitative research using practices such as in-depth interviews, story sharing, and other participatory approaches to engage and empower communities, leverage community expertise, and provide much-needed context to grasp the meaning behind the numbers.

As others have noted, every data point represents the experience of an individual human being. I’m proud of the efforts by Iowa researchers to honor these individuals and their experiences in our shared pursuit of better, healthier futures for all.