Tobacco control = cancer reduction
Addressing the plenary session this week Professor Judith Mackay of the World Lung Foundation said lung cancer survival rates were dismal.
She said there had been inadequate spending on tobacco control and that it had been very poorly funded by governments.
Mackay said it was also alarming to note that in many parts of the world a high number of health workers themselves were smokers. She said it was not unusual for doctors in China to smoke in the presence of their patients.
‘It is also critical that we teach students about tobacco and how to counsel patients who want to stop,’ she added.
Mackay said that despite efforts to bring the prevalence of smoking down, the number of smokers would increase due to the population growth.
‘This means that despite the messages from big tobacco companies that small tobacco farmers will be out of jobs because of tougher legislation, it will not happen in my lifetime,’ she said.
At another event earlier this week Dr Serigne Gueye, President of the African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer urged South African first lady Tobeka Madiba-Zuma to take the lead. He said the rest of the continent looked to South Africa to take the lead in tobacco control and the cancer battle.
It is widely expected that by 2020 70% of cancers will occur in the developing world, mainly in Africa.
Gueye warned that there was no use in screening for cancer if health workers were unable to offer treatment, a reality in many African countries where radiation and chemotherapy is absent.
Dr John Seffrin Chief Executive Officer of the American Cancer Society, the world’s largest voluntary health organisation devoted to fighting cancer, said that effective tobacco control could save millions of lives and billions of dollars. He said it was inexplicable that despite the fact that cancer was costing the world economy around U$895-billionper year, the disease was not on the G8 agenda.
‘Cancer will become the disease of this century and it can either become the first non-communicable disease we manage to bring under control or a disease that has a devastating impact for generations to come,’ said Seffrin.
Madiba-Zuma is playing an increasing role in the fight against breast and cervical cancer on the continent and is currently leading the Forum of African First Ladies Against Breast & Cervical Cancer.
Madiba-Zuma and her fellow first ladies have made a commitment to work for improved financing and leadership for the prevention of women’s cancers.
Author
-
Health-e News is South Africa's dedicated health news service and home to OurHealth citizen journalism. Follow us on Twitter @HealtheNews
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Unless otherwise noted, you can republish our articles for free under a Creative Commons license. Here’s what you need to know:
-
You have to credit Health-e News. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication.” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by Health-e News.” You must link the word “Health-e News” to the original URL of the story.
-
You must include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up link.
-
If you use canonical metadata, please use the Health-e News URL. For more information about canonical metadata, click here.
-
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week”)
-
You have no rights to sell, license, syndicate, or otherwise represent yourself as the authorized owner of our material to any third parties. This means that you cannot actively publish or submit our work for syndication to third party platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. Health-e News understands that publishers cannot fully control when certain third parties automatically summarise or crawl content from publishers’ own sites.
-
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually.
-
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. You can find us on Twitter @HealthENews, Instagram @healthenews, and Facebook Health-e News Service.
You can grab HTML code for our stories easily. Click on the Creative Commons logo on our stories. You’ll find it with the other share buttons.
If you have any other questions, contact info@health-e.org.za.
Tobacco control = cancer reduction
by healthe, Health-e News
August 20, 2010