January 12, 2016 – Worldwide Cancer

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Anchor lead: How does the burden of cancer differ around the world? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Domestically, cancer is largely becoming a chronic disease, one people live with for many years.  Now the Institute of Medicine has looked at cancer patterns worldwide.  William Nelson, director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Nelson: In this country if you look at the incident number of cancer cases per year it’s about 1.6 million or so, about 550,000 cancer deaths each year, which means many more people, fortunately, are living with cancer than dying from it.  if you look at the worldwide burden it’s on the order of 12 million cases per year but 8 million deaths so it’s sort of actually reversed. We need to export treatment that’s effective and we need to do it in a way that’s cost effective, and we need to export some of our screening and prevention tools.   :31

Nelson says some cancers that occur in low and middle income countries will occur much less often when screening and prevention strategies are in place.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.