According to a study, 3 out of 4 cancer patients worldwide do not receive appropriate surgery. Only 60% have access to radiotherapy.
This is commonly referred to as the double penalty. In addition to being sick, some cannot even heal themselves. According to data published in the British journal The Lancet Oncology, millions of people die each year in the world from curable cancers because they do not have access to necessary surgeries or radiotherapy.
Presented at the European Cancer Congress (ECC), which is being held from September 26 to 29 in Vienna (Austria), the data show that more than three quarters of cancer patients do not benefit from “safe surgery”. And ‘appropriate’ in the world.
Radiotherapy difficult to access
“Our new estimates suggest that less than one in 20 patients in low-income countries and around one in five in middle-income countries have access to even basic surgery,” says Prof. Richard Sullivan. , from King’s College in London, which heads the commission that produced the report on cancer surgery.
Another commission created to assess access to radiotherapy estimates that only 40 to 60% of the 12 million cancer patients who could benefit from it were entitled to this treatment considered essential in cancers such as breast, prostate and lung.
Today, the use of radiotherapy is particularly low in low-income countries, where it barely reaches 10%. This figure is even much lower in Africa, where some forty countries do not have any device of this type.
Africa and Asia fear the worst
This situation is all the more worrying given that we already know that the number of new cases of cancer each year in the world (15 million at present) will increase further, reaching 22 million by 2030. 80% of them would require surgery, while 60% would need radiotherapy treatment.
With the explosion of cancers in the next 15 years, “the international community will no longer be able to ignore the problem”, estimates Professor Pramesh, an Indian specialist, who confirms that the situation will be particularly serious in the poorest countries, in particular in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, “where surgical needs are expected to increase by 60% by 2030”.
Too expensive treatments
Finally, these specialists are also concerned about the fact that a third of patients operated on in the less wealthy countries are faced with costs so high that they fall into poverty. And that a quarter stop his treatment because he can no longer pay.
The only good news in this report, according to the commission’s calculations, the equivalent of 27 million years of life could be gained by 2035 if nearly 100 billion dollars (90 billion euros) were invested in radiotherapy equipment in the years to come.
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