There is the well-known estimate of 12.6 million cancer survivors in the U.S., but I cannot find a similar estimate for the world (other than incidence and prevalence).
I also don't know the number, but from your question I understood that you see an difference between cancer survivorship and prevalence. In cancer statistics survivorship and prevalence are almost the same, because these statistics do not account for cure (cured patients are not prevalent anymore but survivors).
According to the International Agency on Research on Cancer the 5-year worldwide prevalence is 28.8 million (see http://globocan.iarc.fr/). This means from the incidence of the last 5 years there are this number of patients alive (independent from cure). This is cancer survivorship. For US the 5-year prevalence is estimated by IARC with 4.2 millions .
Unfortunately they didn't publish a prevalence for a longer time period.
What is the source of the 12.6 mill survivors in U.S.?
you can see this estimate and other similarly to this in who.int ... hum?? or you see tese saits:
www.cancer.org/research/cancerfactsfigures/acspc-031941
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_survivor
Alexander - here is 12.6 estimate in the US for lifetime prevalence: http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html#survival
Julia Rowland alerted me to newer estimates of US survivors, at 13.7 million: http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@editorial/documents/document/acspc-033812.pdf
I don't know the answer to this but will ask one of our epidemiologists.
Lee
http://www.who.int/gho/ncd/mortality_morbidity/cancer_text/en/ Suggest visiting the WHO website
I don't find any answer about the exact number of persons alive in the world who have ever had cancer. Visit for some estimation: www.who.int/cancer
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