Paper short abstract:

Departing in writings on the act of persuasion and the statistical style of reasoning, this paper traces the contagious connections of cancer epidemiology at a local cancer registration service, which strive to fight cancer with information by providing online, near real-time statistics.

Paper long abstract:

With a stated goal of "Fighting cancer with information" the National Cancer Registration Service (NCRS) in England has recently launched the world's largest cancer database with a background population of 52 million and with thousands of interlinked data records from the clinic and beyond. Armed with this information, the registry strives to provide online, near real-time statistics to patients, clinicians, and politicians alike - thus facilitating benchmarking at a personal, local, national, and international level. This paper departs in ethnographic fieldwork from 2014 among registration officers, liaison mangers, software developers and data analysts at an innovative regional office of the NCRS. The collecting of individual data and spread of statistics by this small institution, invokes several units of analyses at more scales. Inspired by Crombie's historical anthropology of thought and Hacking's proposed styles of (scientific) reasoning, the paper traces the contagious connections within the field of cancer epidemiology by exploring different acts of persuasion at the local cancer registration service. The paper describes how people make cancer information reasonable and persuasive in this domain - and what actions are thought to induce people to believe in cancer epidemiology outside the cancer registration service?