Geneva, 20 September 2024:
From China, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, India, South East Asia and Europe, cancer specialists spelled out the differences and identified the similarities in the challenges they face in their daily battles against this many-headed and deadly disease around the globe.
Their reflections were deepened by the presence of top figures from leading international organisations – the Union for International Cancer Control, the World Federation of Public Health Associations, the IARC/WHO Scientific Council, and the Latin-American & Caribbean Society of Medical Oncology,
Together they were able to see how re-aligned priorities in evaluating the needs of patients, healthcare professionals and health systems could lead to improved and safer access – to diagnostics and to treatment.
Speakers took account of the options increasingly available as rapidly advancing technology offers an ever-wider range of new and potential tools to diagnose and treat in a more personalized manner, wherever the battle is joined.
While the problems of tackling cancer are as diverse as the disease itself – and the conference underscored how increased scientific understanding is revealing ever more profound complexities in the manifestations of cancer and the mechanisms behind it – the potential response mechanisms and policies can equally bring multiple ways of relief.
Speaker after speaker stressed how the rising attention to the crisis that is cancer, together with more focused provision of public health care, is leading to expanded and more sophisticated efforts for screening at-risk populations and caring for the
growing numbers of survivors and the difficulties many of them face during continued monitoring, and even after successful treatment.
Attention was also paid to how urgently action is needed, sine the costs of cancer—in terms of direct costs in diagnosis and treatment, and indirect costs in working lives lost or reduced by disease and by care—present a major challenge in their own right, not only to the individuals and families affected, but also to the collective and public health systems.
As Denis Horgan, the EAPM Executive Director, who moderated the conference, pointed out in his conclusions to the meeting, much of the possible improvements will become reality not only because of medical advances, but if and when policy debates and political decisions are also aligned on solutions.
“The organization of care systems, the investment in infrastructure to enable advanced care, the continuation of support for cancer research (including into why some populations are more susceptible than others to particular cancers), and the conduct of large-scale targeted screening are not just the consequence scientific or health decisions. It is time for policy-makers also to step up.”
