WASHINGTON: The medical community has gained a better understanding of cancer after a half-century of enormous investments and research, but the disease is still winning the battle.
The cancer mortality rate has barely changed in this century compared to 50 years ago, while the death rates of cardiac, cerebrovascular and infectious diseases have declined by about two-thirds, said Harold Varmus, a Nobel medicine prize laureate.
“Despite large federal and industrial investments in cancer research and a wealth of discoveries about the genetic, biochemical, and functional changes in cancer cells, cancer is commonly viewed as, at best, minimally controlled by modern medicine, especially when compared with other major diseases,†he wrote in the May 26 edition of the journal Science.
Varmus, a doctor at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said real progress would not be achieved unless an ‘important change in culture’ takes place to overcome social obstacles and improve collaboration between researchers, doctors, pharmaceutical laboratories and regulators.
Sandra Horning, the president of the American College of Clinical Oncology, echoed those worries at the group’s annual conference earlier this month and complained of a ‘lack of progress’ in the application of discoveries.
But medical experts have also emphasised that research alone was not enough to beat cancer, saying that people need to make better lifestyle choices to avoid getting the disease. “To win the war against cancer we must focus not just on advances in biomedical technologies, but also on technologies and policies that change the behaviours and environments that cause those cancers,†he said Majid Ezzati of Harvard University.
According to a study published in the British medical journal The Lancet last year, more than one-third of cancer deaths are the result of nine factors. Of seven million cancer deaths in 2001, 2.43 million were attributed to those factors, which include smoking. One in five cancer deaths were due to smoking.
The other factors are alcohol drinking, obesity, lack of physical activity, insufficient consumption of fruits and vegetables, air pollution and unprotected sex.
