Is Cancer In Poor Countries Too Big To Tackle?

If you think of global health as Mount Everest, cancer control would be a small flag at its peak.

Faced with a mountain, where to begin?

“Politicians don’t do things that are too difficult,” Baroness Delyth Morgan said as she summed up the day. “Simple, clear messages are important.”

A few of these emerged in the course of the day: providing simple diagnostic technologies that can be maintained, training non-specialists to treat common cancers with basic procedures, doing more to manage pain, treating each country’s needs differently and pressing aid agencies and the private sector for more support.

And there was talk about data: the need for it—“what gets measured gets done” was a popular adage in the room—and the difficulty getting it from developing countries.

Dr. Claudia Allemani, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, presented global statistics on survival rates that exposed the poor availability of cancer registry data in the developing world. Collecting this data can be expensive—it often means paying people to take surveys door to door, said Allemani.

Sullivan raised another issue with statistics: what countries may declare on official registries can be very different from the reality on the ground. And what’s often missing is the qualitative research that should go along with the data.

He told SciDev.Net this could be interviews with community leaders, not just clinic or hospital staff. And it’s necessary because policies are often based purely on quantitative data, but this isn’t enough to make meaningful changes in policy.


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Source: SciDev.Net; Photo: Shutterstock.
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