Offline: Why has global health forgotten cancer? - The Lancet
▻https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32162-7/abstract
Nothing illustrates the embedded irrationality of global health more than our attitudes to cancer. In 2016, according to the Global Burden of Disease, 8·9 million people died from cancer (23% of total worldwide deaths from NCDs, and 16% of deaths from all causes). The leading causes of cancer death are tumours of the trachea, bronchus, and lung (1·7 million deaths); gynaecological cancers (breast, cervix, ovary, and uterus: 1 million deaths); gastric cancer (834 000 deaths); colorectal cancer (829 600 deaths); and liver cancer (828 000 deaths). So why the indifference?
The NCD community has become trapped in an ideology that privileges prevention over treatment. A similar mistake disfigured the early response to AIDS. I can recall senior WHO leaders two decades ago agreeing that a generation of people living with HIV would have to die before the pandemic could be controlled by prevention. Only anger and activism overturned the complacency of traditional public health practice. But the NCD community has no time for anger or activism
#cancer #OMS #prévention #traitement (again)
