All datasets › Health
Lung Cancer in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of lung cancer news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about lung cancer, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API. Scholarly journal abstracts that the index also carries are excluded.
Download
Data-platform copies are being published; links appear here as they go live.
Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, lung cancer took 2.38 of every 10,000 news articles in 2019 and 1.79 in 2025, a 24.8% fall in its share of news coverage, while the number of articles rose from 2,816 to 4,824.
Basis: Annual lung cancer articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year (30,856 matched articles in all).
Lung cancer's share of news fell 19.3% from 2019 to 2020 (2.38 to 1.92 articles per 10,000), the second-lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025 after 2025 itself.
Basis: Annual lung cancer articles per 10,000 articles in the index, 2019–2025.
February 2021, the month of the death of the broadcaster Rush Limbaugh from lung cancer, was the month in which lung cancer took its largest share of global news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 3.95 articles per 10,000.
Basis: Monthly lung cancer articles per 10,000 news articles, every month from January 2019 to July 2026; in the article sample, that month's items cluster in the days after his death was announced and carry political-biography and celebrity-death themes.
Averaged over 2019–2025, February held the largest share of a year's lung cancer news (10.16%), and February, August and November together held 28.66%; these are the months of World Cancer Day, World Lung Cancer Day and lung cancer awareness month.
Basis: Within-year month shares of matched articles, averaged over the complete years 2019–2025.
Of 110,392 items in a global news index that used lung cancer vocabulary in their opening between January 2019 and July 2026, 79,536 (72.05%) were removed by exclusion rules for scholarly journal abstracts, market-report notices and website boilerplate, items that a count of lung cancer news coverage must leave out.
Basis: Term matches with and without the release's exclusion patterns (abstract layout of a title followed directly by its summary, section labels such as "background:", market-forecast notices).
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 4,371 | 60.4% | 1.25 |
| United Kingdom | 554 | 7.66% | 1.31 |
| India | 413 | 5.71% | 0.43 |
| China | 373 | 5.15% | 1.96 |
| Canada | 124 | 1.71% | 0.8 |
| Australia | 121 | 1.67% | 0.78 |
| Spain | 111 | 1.53% | 1.57 |
| France | 101 | 1.4% | 0.71 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "lung cancer" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Lung Cancer in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/lung-cancer/