Cancer is not an inescapable fate. But while prevention can save millions of lives much more cheaply than treatment, it remains an underfunded, much-neglected weapon in the anti-cancer arsenal, experts say.
Some 14 million new cancers are diagnosed each year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) – a number expected to swell to 21 million by 2030.
As the global cost of treatment skyrockets, measures to prevent people getting cancer in the first place are an increasingly important focus in seeking to limit the expected explosion.
“The way things will evolve over, let’s say the next 20 years, are very dramatic; many countries (will have) probably twice as many cancers,” said Christopher Wild, director of the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).
“That’s particularly true for countries with limited resources, the low and middle-income countries,” he told AFP.
With less access to diagnosis and treatment, these countries already bear two-thirds of the world’s annual 8.8 million cancer deaths.
In 2015, governments and patients spent $107 billion (99 billion euros) on cancer drugs – an increase of 11.5 percent from 2014, according to the Global Oncology Trend Report of the IMS Institute.
The figure was expected to grow to $150 billion by 2020, it said, a rise driven largely by the expense of newer, more specialised drugs to which just a minority of patients have access.
“Treating our way out of the cancer problem is not realistic,” Wild told AFP on the eve of Saturday’s World Cancer Day.
