Cancer Is World’s ‘Top Economic Killer’
The American Cancer Society said in a new report that it plans to present at a global cancer conference in China this week that cancer is the world’s top "economic killer" as well as its likely leading cause of death.
The report says that cancer costs more in productivity and lost life than AIDS, malaria, the flu and other diseases that spread person-to-person.
Rachel Nugent of the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based policy research group, told The Associated Press (AP) that chronic disease like cancer, heart disease and diabetes account for over 60 percent of deaths worldwide, but less than 3 percent of public and private funding for global health.
Dr. Otis Brawley, the cancer’s society’s chief medical officer, told AP that money should not be taken away from fighting diseases that spread person-to-person, but the amount devoted to cancer is way out of whack with the impact it has.
The report says that cancer’s economic blow cost $895 billion in 2008, which is equivalent to 1.5 percent of the world’s gross domestic product.Â
The World Health Organization is predicting that cancer will overtake heart disease this year as the number one cause of death. About 7.6 million people died of cancer in 2008, and about 12.4 million new cases are diagnosed each year.
Tobacco use and obesity are a driving cause to chronic diseases like cancer and heart disease.
Many consumer groups have been trying to push more attention to non-infectious causes of death, and the United Nations General Assembly has set a meeting next year to discuss it. Some policy experts are comparing it to be the global initiative that led to big increases in spending on AIDS nearly a decade ago.
"This needs to be discussed at the UN “” how we are going to deal with this" rising burden of chronic disease, Dr. Andreas Ullrich, medical officer for cancer control at WHO, told AP.
The answer is "not a fight against each other," but more cooperation on areas that overlap, such as cancers with infectious causes, such as cervical cancer and HPV, human papillomavirus, Ullrich said.
The cancer society’s report is the first major effort to take into consideration the economic impact of the disease. Authors plan to publish the findings in a scientific journal and present it Thursday during the World Cancer Congress in Shenzen, China.
"That has become a more and more common way of looking at the global burden of disease," Wendy Max, a health economist at the University of California, San Francisco, told AP.
The report says that lung and related cancers account for $180 billion of the $895 billion total. Smokers die an average of 15 years earlier than nonsmokers. Heart disease follows cancer as second in the global economic impact tallying up a $753 billion total.
"Heart conditions usually hit people towards the end of their life. The cancers struck people much earlier in their life cycle," the lead author, cancer society health economist Hana Ross told AP.
Cancer scientists and advocates published a separate article online Monday in the medical journal Lancet urging more money to help fight cancer in poor countries.
Dr. Julio Frenk, one of the authors and dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health, told AP that only 5 percent of cancer treatment and prevention money goes to poorer countries, which bear 80 percent of the burden.Â
"We are literally being victims of our own success" “” more people are surviving infectious diseases and living long enough to develop cancer, but treatment gaps remain, he said.
Chief medical officer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Dr. Lawrence Shulman, told AP that cure rates for breast cancer are 80 percent or more in the U.S. and half that in many other countries.
He said many treatments are quite affordable "and could be successfully delivered in even the poorest settings."
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