Cancer Commentary - Caring About Cancer

Cancer and the World

by Gloria Gamat on April 4th, 2007

I live in a third world Asian country where quality healthcare is not readily accessible to the average person. The general population is not only poor (average daily wage is 1-2 USD) but also lacking in education. Difficult to say, but it is the truth.

I have been blogging about health and science for the past year and I’ve realized that people of the west (mostly U.S. and Europe as we normally mean by west in this part of the globe)  doesn’t only have access to rich resources about healthcare (the blogosphere for example as a rich source of information about health and healthcare), doesn’t only have access to the best of healthcare but also only a doorstep away to clinical trials on serious diseases like cancer.

I read about cancer everyday, the recent breakthroughs and research findings, public personalities coming out into the open telling the world about their cancer, clinical data on cancer are generally derived from the western population.

While couple of weeks ago, I visited somebody’s wake here in my small village: 45 years old male died possibly of kidney or prostate cancer.  A local farmer who have never been admitted to any hospital, except a month before his death when he complained of tremendous pain between his abdomen and reproductive area. The diagnosis, something in the  kidney, something in the prostate…the big C word was whispered about. Whispered about, not even exactly sure…maybe because the symptoms were there, but tests were never done…the poor man was practically a goner, so who cares maybe?

My point is that, cancer might be happening in very remote, even unheard of places in the world while clinical trials are conducted only in key countries of the world.

Recently, the United Nations has taken the initiative on its war against cancer and it  made me wonder if it will reach every surface of the globe.

Cancer drugs are being approved left and right in the EU and the US for every cancer there is, cancer diagnostic tests are becoming commercially available every now and then. Researchers are coming up with the early-detection test possible.

But the question remains: will all of human-kind, as in ALL (regardless of race and financial status), have access to all of those?

There should be a global body (the United Nations maybe?) that will launch programs that will facilitate cancer screening and treatment to practically anywhere in the world, when issue of money and politics will be put aside.

A shot at the moon maybe? Heck, I am on a wishful thinking mood, so why not?!

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