Australia Joins Global News Coverage of "We Can, We Should, We Will Conquer Cancer"

The Sydney Morning Herald 

By Mark Metherell

The Great Leap Backward

Bruce Ward has survived three different cancers over the past 39 years. This week he went to New York to tell the world about the value of hope. He has joined 100 other cancer survivors from 50 countries who went to the United Nations to call for a dramatic shift in the global health effort to fight diseases such as cancer.

Ward, 70, was told 39 years ago by his doctor that he had testicular cancer and had about six months to live. Refusing to accept a death sentence, he continued to work and coach rugby.

He survived that, then secondary cancer in his lungs. Ward prospered until 2004, when he suffered another setback - prostate cancer.

He took part in trial therapy that appeared to work. However, cancer returned in a rare and more aggressive form two years ago. It had developed outside the prostate and protruded into the bladder but after radical surgery, he has survived once more.

To meet the cheerful, energetic Ward, his trials with cancer seem all the more remarkable.

He wants the world to know there is hope. That is why he has joined a worldwide campaign to convince global leaders to meet at the UN in September to boost the fight against non-communicable diseases such as cancer, heart disease and diabetes.

''My hope is that people may never fear to hear the words 'you have cancer' because they know it can be beaten,'' says Ward, a retired chemical engineer from Albert Park, Melbourne.

This week, the American Cancer Society flew in cancer survivors and journalists from around the world as part of its concerted bid to persuade world leaders to take a step unprecedented by the UN: the first declaration on a public-health issue demanding a co-ordinated effort by all governments to quell the diseases of modern life: heart disease, respiratory disease, cancer and diabetes.

This follows the realisation around the world that these conditions are not the preserve of the minority of wealthy countries but now afflict developing nations, where such illnesses now account for more disease and death than infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS.

The emergence of more cancer patients in countries lacking the sophisticated medical and diagnostic facilities taken for granted in the West is heightening fears of a yawning divide in cancer treatment.

A passionate crusader for an end to what she terms the ''cancer genocide'' is Jordan's Princess Dina Mired, who says cancer once ''passed unnoticed'' as the disease of the rich. Action, she says, is desperately needed to address the ''harsh disparity''.

''The chance of a cure should not be an accident of geography,'' she told a Cancer Society dinner at New York's plush Pierre restaurant.

The expectation of the advocates for change, however, is that the UN declaration has little chance of support from the indebted West if there is any requirement for significant new contributions of cash.

Rather, the hope is that better-targeted aid, more prevention, higher tobacco taxes and cheaper, more cost-effective, treatments will provide credible solutions.

In a detailed brief on the impact of chronic disease, the American Cancer Society says almost 80 per cent of the world's deaths from non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes occur in developing countries.

In China and India, such chronic conditions are rapidly emerging as a vast health challenge, as lifestyles and diets change with prosperity.

A graphic illustration is to compare photographs of a busy street scene in Beijing now with 30 years ago. Then, the street was thick with people on bicycles, with hardly a vehicle to be seen. Now, that street is choked with cars.

Less routine exercise and the rich diets that affluence brings are taking a growing toll on countries such as China. The incidence of cancer in low-income countries is expected to rise by 82 per cent by 2030, compared with an expected 40 per cent growth in richer nations.

''The costs of doing nothing increase as non-communicable diseases rise, overwhelming resource-poor health systems and slowing economic growth,'' the American Cancer Society says.

It cites the World Economic Forum finding that chronic diseases are among the three greatest risks to the global economy because of the escalating cost of care, the threat to productivity from death and lingering disease and the impoverishing impact on families.

But less than 3 per cent of global health aid is directed at preventing and treating non-communicable diseases. Even though developing countries bear 80 per cent of the global cancer burden, only about 5 per cent of the money spent worldwide on cancer reaches these countries.

The cancer movement is deploying people like Bruce Ward to press people such as Australia's representatives to the UN to push for a strongly worded declaration to be put to world leaders at September's high-level meeting in New York.

Central to that statement is an issue of direct interest to Australia right now: the campaign to stop smoking.

In what its advocates say is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put cancer and other chronic diseases on the global health agenda, the key demand is for the World Health Organisation's campaign against smoking to be accelerated to achieve ''a world free from tobacco by 2040''.

Even though almost 90 per cent of the world's population live in nations that have ratified the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, less than 10 per cent is covered by any domestic tobacco-control policy.

That's a big contrast to the position in Australia, where plans to enforce plain packaging of cigarettes is way ahead of places such as the US, which only this week is to release the health-scare images to go on packs.

Australia's move is ''incredibly valuable'' to the international cause, says Professor Michael Eriksen, who headed the US Centres for Disease Control unit on smoking and health for 10 years. ''Smoking is all about image and cigarette packages represent extremely powerful images just like traditional marketing used to,'' says Eriksen, now the director of the Institute of Public Health at Georgia State University.

Plain packaging is still a long way off in the US because of the power of the tobacco industry, he says.

''But some time in the future, it will eventually become the norm.''

Eriksen was one of many high-powered speakers wheeled out by the Cancer Society to support the call for an invigorated campaign against the causes of non-communicable disease. Another was Nobel laureate Dr Harold Varmus. He says there is an urgent need to tackle these diseases in a global effort, not only given the many unanswered questions about cancer but also its link with infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria - still widespread in developing countries - as well as other bacterial conditions, all of which can be precursors to cancer.

But great hope is also being placed in medical advances and the increasing availability of cheap cancer drugs that were once beyond the reach of the developing world, says Varmus, who is director of America's National Cancer Institute.

Mark Metherell was in New York as a guest of the American Cancer Society.

This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/wellbeing/the-great-leap-backwards-20110622-1gfbv.html

 

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