NCI conducts several dissemination activities through the Office of Cancer Information, Communication, and Education (OCICE). The Cancer Information Service (CIS) provides information to cancer patients and their families through a toll-free telephone information service and through community outreach efforts and educational campaigns. The International Cancer Information Center (ICIC) provides cancer information to scientists, health care professionals, and the public through PDQ, the NCI's cancer information database, and the bibliographic CANCER-LIT database. NCI also disseminates information via its site on the World Wide Web.

NCI categorizes research and training programs relevant to special populations (including ethnic minority and medically underserved populations) into two subgroups. Category I programs are defined as "research or training targeted to, or for, a specific special population or populations," whereas Category II programs are "research on a problem affecting all populations (thus, not targeted to any specific group). This research is, however, of special significance to a specific special population or populations" (National Cancer Institute, 1998b, p. 4). Both program subtypes are reported here.

NCI's cancer surveillance effort is aimed at identifying and reporting on the disease frequencies in the U.S. population that may be useful in identifying trends and generating causal hypotheses. At the core of this effort is the SEER program, which is described in greater detail in Chapter 2. SEER program data emanate from 11 population-based registries including registries in the states of Connecticut, Iowa, New Mexico, Utah, and Hawaii and the metropolitan areas of Detroit, San Francisco-Oakland and the San Jose area south of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle-Puget Sound, and Atlanta and the 10 counties in Georgia surrounding Atlanta. According to NCI, the population in geographic areas in the SEER program represent approximately 14 percent of the U.S. population, including 25 percent of the Hispanic American population, 41 percent of the Asian/Pacific Islander population (including 43 percent of all Chinese Americans and 60 percent of all Japanese Americans), 27 percent of American