World Cancer Leaders’ Summit 2015

The importance of cancer prevention

Carolyn Aldige - Prevent Cancer Foundation, Alexandria, USA

You’re the Executive Officer, Chief Executive Officer, for Prevent Cancer Foundation and you’re here today to delivery to us some startling and frightening statistics. What is it all about?

The one statistic I would like to leave everyone watching this with is the fact that less than 5%, virtually everywhere around the globe, less than 5% of the entire cancer budget, non-communicable disease budget, is spent on prevention.

What’s going wrong globally?

It’s a very good question because we know with what we know right now we could eliminate half of cancer cases and virtually half of cancer deaths and the incidence is due to lack of prevention and the death rate could come down with more prevention and better treatment.

Now, we know there has been success in some countries and not others. What do you regard as the big priorities? Obviously smoking is an obvious one.

Smoking is huge but the fact is that obesity is poised to become the leading cause of cancer in just a few years, by 2030. So in fifteen short years obesity will overtake smoking as the number one cause of cancer.

What do you think should be the big targets, then, to go for in various countries all around the world?

Our governments are the big targets because that’s where the real money is. But it will take a collaborative effort of NGOs, patients, clinicians and researchers to continue to reduce the rate and the death rate from cancer with what we know right now.

Public education is a big thing, isn’t it? How do you think that can be done?

Public education is critical and I think it can be done by having organisations like ours deliver messages. We need industry as a partner, the pharmaceutical industry for example, the device industry, we need clinicians as partners to deliver the messages. The message must be delivered on multiple fronts.

Preventing cancer, of course, is a long-term issue so what kind of advice would you give to families and to give to doctors of all kinds, not only cancer doctors, to be talking with families about?

Doctors of all kinds, including oncologists, need to be talking to their patients and their patients’ families about how they can prevent cancer. The fact is that preventing cancer also reduces your risk of heart disease, diabetes, many of the risk factors are the same, tobacco and obesity being chief among them.

And if any of the powers that be, governments around the world, are listening, what sort of funding quantities of increase do you think needs to be done? Some presumably aren’t doing much at all?

Some aren’t doing much at all, even in the United States, which is not exactly a low income country, still less than 5% of our federal budget is spent on cancer prevention. We need to be doing a better job of preventing cancer by changing behaviour and also through screening. Screening is very important and we have the resources to do it and yet only about half of the people who need colon cancer screening, for example, in the US are screened.

There is another obvious target, people who have already had cancer are quite at risk, aren’t they?

People who have already had cancer are at higher risk than the average person of developing a second kind of cancer. Many cancer survivors, once they have actually survived the disease, had a successful outcome, feel like they are immune to other cancers but the fact is they are not immune.

How would you sum this all up then, that one of the world’s biggest killers is not being held back, not being prevented? What are the big messages you’d leave people with?

The overarching message is that we can save lives by changing our behaviour to encompass what we know right now. We wouldn’t have to do another research study to eliminate 50% of cancer cases and 50% of cancer deaths.

And to work diligently on ways of getting those messages out.

We have to work together, that’s, I think, the key is that it’s going to take a collaborative effort on the part of patient advocates, NGOs, government, industry, the clinicians, everybody has got to work together to do this and we can achieve something great.