Appalachia:
With a total population of 22.8 million, the Appalachian region includes 410 counties; all of West Virginia and parts of 12 other states and extends more than a thousand miles from the southern tier of New York to northeast Mississippi. In 2000, the poverty rate in Appalachia was 13.6 percent. It is noteworthy that the incidence of lung cancer in 1992 among white men in Kentucky was 111 per 100,000 while in the Appalachian area of Kentucky, a region characterized by high poverty, the incidence of lung cancer among white males in 1992 was 127 per 100,000.

Desert Southwest:
U.S. cervical cancer mortality increased with increasing area poverty for women in all racial/ethnic groups. During 1995-1999, American Indian and Hispanic women in high poverty counties ( which comprise large parts of the Desert Southwest) had almost twice the cervical cancer mortality of their counterparts in low poverty counties. The cervical cancer mortality rates were respectively 45% and 37% higher for non-Hispanic white women and black women in high poverty counties than in low poverty counties.