Cancer threat to poor demands same action as AIDS

Cancer is threatening to overwhelm poor countries and governments are under pressure to organise the kind of joined-up global response enlisted to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Just as with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS, effective drugs, highly-trained doctors, and policies to step up awareness, prevention and screening have been able to turn cancer into an often manageable condition in rich nations.

But in poorer countries, where cancer drugs and specialist knowledge of the disease are scarce, it is still almost always a killer.

"People think that cancer is a disease of the elderly, the rich, the north and the west, but by 2020, 70 percent of all new cancer cases will be in the developing world," said David Kerr, an oncology specialist from Britain's Oxford University.

Meanwhile only about five percent of global resources for cancer are spent in developing countries, where knowledge about preventing the disease and how to get drugs to cure it or keep it in check is extremely low.

"If you take a country like Ghana - it has 25 million people, and four oncologists," Kerr said. "In Sierra Leone, there are none."

Despite the focus on infectious diseases like HIV and malaria, cancer actually kills more people a year in poor countries than AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and is predicted to become an even bigger killer.

BIG KILLER

According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), cancer will kill more than 13.2 million people a year by 2030, almost double the number it killed in 2008 - and the vast majority of deaths will be in low and middle-income countries.

Experts estimate that 75 percent of all those who get cancer in poor regions will die of it, compared with fewer than half of cancer patients in high-income countries.

In the Lancet medical journal last week, the Union for International Cancer Control (UICC), the International Network for Cancer Treatment and Research (INCTR), the American Cancer Society (ACS) and the LiveSTRONG group headed by the cyclist and cancer survivor Lance Armstrong said now was the time to act.

"If we don't intervene now, it's not just the cost of the intervention that we'll have to add on, it's the cost of doing nothing. If we want to wait until 2030 and cope with that chaos, I'm sure society will not thank us," Julie Torode, deputy chief executive of the UICC, said in a telephone interview.

That echoed a similar call in August from an international team of cancer specialists who said the disparity of cancer care between rich and poor was "no longer acceptable".

"What we have now is a global situation ... not unlike when treatment first appeared for HIV/AIDS," Julio Frenk, of Harvard School of Public Health, told reporters in a conference call.