China and India are facing a cancer crisis, with smoking, belated diagnosis and unequal access to treatment all causing large-scale problems, experts said on April 11. In a major report, published in The Lancet Oncology, more than 40 specialists warn that Asia's big two emerging giants are facing huge economic and human costs from the disease. In China, cancer now accounts for one in every five deaths, ranking second only to cardiovascular disease as the most common cause of mortality, according to the study.
60 percent of cancer cases in China are attributable to "modifiable environmental factors," including smoking, water contamination and air pollution, it said.
But public awareness of the risk remains extremely low, the experts wrote, tinged by either fatalism or a misplaced faith in traditional medicine to tackle the disease.
But funding is also an issue. China currently spends only 5.1 percent of its national income on health care - roughly only half the rate of European countries - and just 0.1 percent of this spending goes specifically to cancer. In the United States, by comparison, cancer accounts for 1 percent of health spending, or ten times as much.
Patients in China also need to pay for most cancer treatment themselves, which can lead to catastrophic health care bills, while urban areas have twice as many cancer care beds than rural areas, even though half of China's population live in the countryside. "A quarter of all cancer deaths world-wide are in China," said Paul Goss, a Harvard Medical School professor who led the Chinese study.
"Some of the main factors responsible for the huge burden of this disease, such as insufficient and unevenly distributed health care resources and public misconceptions about the disease, are barely visible on China's national agenda." In India, around one million new cancer cases are diagnosed each year, a tally that is projected to reach 1.7 million in 2035.
Deaths from cancer are currently 600,000-700,000 annually, although this figure is also forecast to rise, to around 1.2 million.
The study showed that while incidence of cancer in the Indian population is only about a quarter of that in the US or Europe, mortality rates among those diagnosed with the disease are much higher.