Over half of these will be in the Asia and Pacific regions, which still lack the means to fight this looming health crisis.

"The international community has to do something with this enormous problem and burden," said Dr Peter Boyle, of the World Health Organisation's International Agency for Research on Cancer, at a cancer control workshop in Bangkok yesterday.

Cancer kills more than Aids and tuberculosis put together, said Massoud Samiei, who is the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Programme of Action for Cancer Therapy.

In 2005 there were about 7.6 million new cancer patients around the world. That figure is expected to double by 2020, he said.

The incidence of cancer and mortality figures were based on the increase in the world's population, the rise in the number of ageing populations and other cancer risk factors.

More importantly, 70 per cent of the patients were expected to be in developing countries that lacked effective treatment and care, not to mention the absence of national measures to fight cancer, said Malcolm A Moore, the head of the International Union Against Cancer's Asia Regional Office (UICC-ARO)

"Cancer used to be regarded as a disease of the highly developed world, yet the situation has changed dramatically and the disease has increasingly become common in the less developed world now," Boyle said.

The introduction of risk factors through western eating habits in Asia had also attributed to the rise of cancer, he said.

However, unlike cancer patients in developed countries, those in the developing world die due to the lack of proper medical facilities and resources including radiotherapy. In Africa, for example, radiotherapy was available for only 20 per cent of cancer patients, Boyle said.

At present, the availability of cancer drugs in developing countries, despite sharing about 61 per cent of the global cancer cases, was just 5 per cent, Moore said.

Since receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, the IAEA had contributed the award money to a joint effort to fight cancer with other organisations such as the WHO and UICC, although this was a limited amount.

For example, Asia needs up to 4,000 radiotherapy machines to facilitate all of its patients, said Manase Peter Salema, the director of IAEA's Division for Asia and the Pacific's Department of Technical Co-operation.

"What we can do is to raise awareness of the seriousness of cancer problems among the governments and potential donors around the world," Salema said.

As a result, the IAEA and other above-mentioned organisations were holding five-day workshops on cancer control for medical experts from 21 countries in Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok.

Two more similar workshops will be held in Africa and Latin America.

The aim is to assist all countries to develop their own cancer control plan that covers both prevention and treatment and care of the disease within the next decade, Moore said.

"We can save thousands of lives if we have the tools, resources and political will," Samiei said.

Arthit Khwankhom

The Nation