Latin America's growing
prosperity is fueling a cancer epidemic that threatens to overwhelm the region
unless governments take urgent preventive action, a study published on Friday
warned.
A multinational team of
researchers found the current state of cancer care and prevention in Latin
America is incompatible with the socioeconomic changes taking place in the
region, where an increasingly urban populace faces mounting lifestyle-related
cancer risks.
Writing in The Lancet
Oncology medical journal, researchers said Latin Americans are enjoying the
benefits of growing economic prosperity, but also are leading longer, more
sedentary lives, accompanied by a rise in alcohol consumption, smoking and
obesity. That is not only leading to an increase in cancer rates, which are
expected to rise more than 33 percent in the region by 2020, but a
disproportionately high number of cancer deaths.
"If corrective
action is not taken this problem will become magnitudes of order bigger than it
is today, it will create massive human suffering and it will threaten the
economies of the region," Paul Goss, a professor at Harvard Medical School
who led the study, said at an event in Sao Paulo on Friday.
While Latin Americans
contract cancer at lower rates than residents of the United States, they are
nearly twice as likely to die from it, the study said.
Much of that has to do
with the way cancer is treated in Latin America. More than half of those in the
region have little or no health insurance and relatively few public health
efforts are focused on preventive medicine. That means most patients seek treatment
when they are at advanced stages of the disease and often too sick to be saved.
That type of care not
only is ineffective but often very expensive, draining already scarce resources
from public coffers, the study found.
Immediate
change needed
The study recommended
Latin American nations make major changes to their healthcare policies, such as
dedicating more funds to public health, widening healthcare access so cancer
patients can be treated earlier and developing better national cancer plans. It
also envisions shifting funds away from costly end-stage cancer treatment
toward palliative care.
While researchers
speaking at Friday's event acknowledged the difficulty of enacting such reforms
quickly, they called on governments to start with short-term solutions, such as
raising taxes on tobacco and providing families with cleaner-burning wood
stoves.
The total cost of
cancer to Latin American countries currently is about $4 billion per year and
stands to grow precipitously, according to the study.
"If we don't put
these things on the agenda now, we won't be prepared to deal with this in 10 or
15 years," said Carlos Barrios, a professor at Brazil's Pontificia
Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande do Sul. "[At that point] the costs
will likely be exorbitant."
Sources :
http://www.voanews.com/content/study-says-latin-america-threatened-by-mounting-cancer-edidemic/1649959.html
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