According to the statement of the director of the International Agency for Research on Cancer issued on Tuesday, the number of diagnosed cancer cases will increase by over hundred per cent between 2000 and 2030, predominantly in poor countries.
Dr Peter Boyle explained that the most important the reasons for the rise include: population growth, amplified life expectancies and the relocation from the developed world to the developing world of cancer risk factors such as smoking together with the existing risks in poor countries including communicable illnesses and no proper health care.
The specialists from the agency estimated that in 2000 there were eleven million new cases of diagnosed cancer all over the world, seven million deaths from cancer and 25 million people living with the disease.
Increase more than twofold
"At present we estimate that between the year 2000 and 2030, there will be an increase by more than one hundred per cent in the number of cases of cancer diagnosed every year," Boyle said. "And the substantial majority of this increase is going to be in the low- and medium-resource countries."
According to the specialists from the agency, by the year 2030, there will be 27 million cases of cancer, 17 million deaths from cancer and 75 million people living with cancer.
"We’ve been focusing on cancer in highly developed countries and until essentially Aids came along, we haven’t observed too closely at what’s going on in low-resource countries," Boyle said at a news conference.
Shift toward poor countries
However, he explained that the new study demonstrates that as time has progressed, there has been a rising shift of cancer to poor countries.
"What is going to happen between now and 2030 is that the number of people is going to go up from nearly 6.5 billion to 8 billion in 2030," Boyle added. "So, even if the risks remain constant at each five-year age group, due to the fact that we’ve got more people all over the world, we’re going to encounter more cases of cancer."
The next factor leading to an increase in cancer cases is the rise in life expectancy in the vast majority of countries, except for some Aids-ravaged countries in Africa, Boyle explained.
Boyle claims that China and India are the countries that experience constant growth in the number of people reaching older ages. "So, if you’ve got older people in the population with the same risks as the younger people, you are going to encounter more cases of cancer in the older population," he explained.
Exporting risk factors
Boyle explained that one of the adverse successes for developed world in the last forty years has been transferring cancer risk factors, including cigarette smoking and alcohol drinking, to poor countries.
"These three elements are going to work together and that is going to escalate the global cancer button over the next thirty years," Boyle added.
25 years ago, the rate of mortality due to cancer of the mouth, larynx and oesophagus was exactly the same in Britain and the United States as it was in Central European countries, informed Boyle. "Today the rate of mortality is ten times higher in Central Europe than it is in the United States, Britain and Western European countries," Boyle added.
He ascribed the sudden increase of alcohol consumption in Central Europe to economic changes in the late 1980s.
A political decision
Boyle explained that spending on health is a political decision, however government bodies must be made conscious of the situation for positive changes to be introduced.
But Boyle said "there is much basic work that has to be done at the global level, and not by individual countries."
One of the ways to decrease the number of cancer cases is to prohibit tobacco use, he explained.
The agency has just finished an estimate concerning cancer cases and deaths in all United Nations World Health Organization regions which discovered that breast cancer is the most widespread or second commonest type of cancer in each region of the world.
The research also revealed that the most widespread form of cancer for men in Africa is Kaposi’s sarcoma, which is directly connected with the HIV/Aids epidemic there.
"The situation becomes more and more difficult due to the fact that we observe that radiotherapy is the mainstay of cancer therapy," Boyle said.
More than fifty per cent of people suffering from cancer in the West receive one course of radiotherapy, and 25 per cent receive two courses, according to the agency’s director.
A lot of the countries without radio therapy
However, there are thirty countries all over the world that do not have a single radiotherapy machine, Boyle explained, and Africa has only enough radiotherapy machines to deal with twenty per cent of the continent’s cancer needs.
Boyle emphasized that cancer treatment medications, such as new HPV vaccines, that cost about $350 in the United States and double in Europe, also have to be offered at affordable levels to poor countries.
The agency experts also revealed that there are commonly more people all over the world who die of cancer than those who die of tuberculosis, Aids and malaria combined.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer, which is situated in Lyon, France, was set up in 1965 by a resolution of the World Health Assembly in order to recognize the causes of cancer so that some preventive measures can be discovered. Over 300 reports are given per year concerning various cancer studies.
