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“What action needs to be taken to tackle the growing cancer crisis in the developing world?” — Listen to responses from key people:
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Nancy Goodman Brinker, founder of the U.S. breast cancer charity Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, is one of the world's most influential and successful cancer campaigners. In October, she joined forces with another champion of cancer prevention and control, Professor Peter Boyle, to address a PACT-organized seminar, The Globalization of Cancer, at IAEA headquarters in Vienna. Each presented compelling evidence of the world's growing cancer crisis and urged a reinvigorated global response to combat the pandemic.
“Compared to other global health communities, the global cancer control community is diffuse and often ineffective,” said Peter Boyle. “It needs to be re-launched and to acquire focus and priorities.”
Boyle described PACT as “inspirational” in its efforts to forge partnerships with other cancer organizations and to integrate radiotherapy into broader strategies aimed at tackling the growing cancer burden in low resource countries.
In June of this year, Brinker was appointed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as its first Goodwill Ambassador for Cancer Control. And in August she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the highest civilian honour in the United States — for her long-term dedication and work as a cancer advocate. The citation said Nancy Brinker's “unique passion and determination have been a blessing to all those whose lives have been touched by breast cancer.” Those qualities are now fuelling her drive to take the fight against cancer to countries least able to resist the onslaught of the disease.
In Vienna, on the first stop of her inaugural international tour as Goodwill Ambassador, Brinker demonstrated the can-do attitude that has guided Komen to raise more than US$ 1.3 billion for breast cancer. “In so many areas of global health diplomacy, certainties are hard to come by,” she told the seminar's audience of IAEA staff, Member States and media. “But I can promise you this: If we turn more of our energy and resources on the global cancer crisis, we can move faster toward saving more lives.”
Action is indeed most urgently needed. Last year alone, there were more than 12 million new cancer cases worldwide. Conservative projections suggest that by 2030 there will be nearly 27 million new cancer cases globally and over 17 million cancer deaths a year, with more than 70 percent of them in low and middle-income countries.
The harsh reality, said Brinker, is that many developing countries today are struggling with a lack of cancer awareness, a lack of cancer treatment facilities and a lack of resources. “Cancer victims in many countries are unscreened, undiagnosed and untreated right up until the end — without so much as pain medication,” she said. “In the statistical equivalent of an unmarked grave, the cause of their suffering and death isn't even specified.”
“We must take this fight everywhere — especially to places where cancer victims often have no defenses, no advocates, and little understanding of what they are up against,” she added.
Formerly Director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), Professor Peter Boyle is now President of the International Prevention Research Institute. His distinguished medical and research background added factual and statistical weight to Brinker's plea for awareness and action.
Citing data collected for IARC's 2008 World Cancer Report, Boyle explained to the seminar that cancer is predominantly a disease of ageing. Because populations today are living longer than ever before, a dramatic increase in chronic diseases, including cancer, is inevitable. “Without doubt a cancer epidemic is going to happen,” he warned. “But we are unprepared. Planning how to deal with it should have started 20 to 30 years ago. We're already behind and need to act now to get to grips with the crisis.”
According to Boyle, that means tackling the crisis on many fronts. “Firstly, we've got to control the risk factors,” he said. “And we've got to change people's attitudes to cancer and convince them that it's not a death sentence. We've got to implement screening for cancer where we can — cervix, breast, colorectal — and catch these cancers early. Then we've got to get the resources, the surgery, the oncology, the radiotherapy, everything in place to get the best possible outcome.”
It's a mammoth undertaking, but some measures are relatively simple. Smoking, for example, is the most preventable cause of cancer worldwide. But it is increasing in the developing world and will trigger an epidemic of tobacco-related cancers in 20 to 30 years, the amount of time it takes to impact health statistics. To save lives, current smokers should stop smoking and young people should not start the habit.
Both Ambassador Brinker and Professor Boyle praised the IAEA for creating the PACT initiative and its vision of working together with other organizations to help countries build effective, sustainable cancer control programmes. “It was a remarkable gesture by IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei to devote the Nobel Peace Prize money to the development of the PACT Programme,” said Boyle.
They agreed that a new approach, new priorities and, of course, new funding, are needed to confront the global cancer crisis. Only by placing cancer on the world health agenda, working together, and removing cancer inequalities, is there hope for lasting success.
With her signature eloquence, Brinker told the seminar: “We have the duty and the ability to save millions of lives in the years to come. We can't meet this crisis by clinging to old attitudes and myths about cancer. It is by no stretch a rich country's disease. But if we fail to act, the treatments and cures for cancer will have become a rich country's luxury — and that would be an injustice we must never accept.”
For Boyle, the existing cancer disparities must be eradicated, urgently. “It's time for action rather than endless report writing and endless committee meetings,” he said.
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