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Is cancer care too expensive for poor countries?

No doctor, no medicine at clinic in rural Nigeria.
Tom Paulson
/
Humanosphere
No doctor, no medicine at clinic in rural Nigeria.

There’s a big push going on right now to expand the scope of the global health agenda, to include many non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like cancer.

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (cancer docs) this week called upon President Barack Obama to push the United Nations to add cancer to the list of priority diseases in global health. The UN, which is holding a special high-level meeting on NCDs in September, seems likely to do so. The UN’s World Health Organization already resolved to do this last year.

Preventing cancer should definitely be on the agenda, as much of that is a matter of behavior change. But should cancer treatment be on the agenda?

Read more at Humanosphere.

The host of the Humanosphere community is Tom Paulson, who spent 22 years reporting on science and medicine at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Tom was one of the first daily news reporters to cover the topic of “global health” (a much-debated label which he discusses the merits of on the Humanosphere website).