Rising Global Cancer Rates
Posted 6/3/2012
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This short article from Medscape is enough to ruin your Sunday. (A fair question, then, might be why I am including it here. I think the answer is because I find it horrifyingly interesting and very important.) I surely don't know what the answers are or how we are going to make the world healthier, but this lays out the challenge.
As some of you know, my husband and I are very involved in a project to attempt to bring cervical cancer screening to a few poor hospitals in ZImbabwe. What seemed like a big and likely complicated problem has, as we peel layer after layer of the onion-like issues, become enormous. There are incredible negative forces and politics and no money and no resources. I am guessing that similar problems are part of the reason for the larger crisis described below.
Global Cancer Rates to Skyrocket by 2030
Megan Brooks May 31, 2012 — The global burden of cancer will surge more than 75% by the year 2030, new research shows.
"On the basis of projected global population changes and the observed trends of several common cancers, we predict the global number of new cancer cases to rise to 22.2 million by 2030 — a 75% increase from the 12.7 million cases estimated for 2008," first author Freddie Bray, PhD, from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, told Medscape Medical News.
Dr. Bray said this study demonstrates "not only how an increasing cancer burden will fall predominantly on countries that are in the process of social and economic transition, but also that the types of cancer that are most common are changing."
"The broad range of countries for which the 'Westernization' effect is in operation is a startling observation," he added.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/764821
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