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By Richard Woodman
LONDON, Mar 26 (Reuters Health) - Cancer deaths will double over the next 20 years, the former chief of the World Health Organization's (WHO) cancer program warned Monday.
Professor Karol Sikora said the WHO estimated that the number of new cases of cancer would increase from 10 million to 20 million per year and the number of deaths from 6 million to 12 million per year.
Three quarters of these patients will live in developing countries where better sanitation, housing and medical care will boost life expectancy but bring many more people into the cancer age range, he explained.
Sikora, now head of cancer medicine at London's Hammersmith Hospital and a consultant to Pharmacia, said smoking and diet were each estimated to cause 3 million cancers a year.
"The problem with diet is that, unlike smoking, we have to eat," he noted in a lecture at the Royal Society in London.
He cast doubt on the view that an organic, vegetarian diet cuts the risk of cancer. "There is no mechanistic reason why organic food should be less cancer causing than normal farm produce. Plants contain far more natural cancer-causing agents than any traces of pesticides."
He said infection caused a surprising 1.5 million cases of cervical cancer, liver cancer and lymphoma. Vaccines could potentially prevent these cancers, he said, yet "politicians avoid tackling this issue as they see no gain until well beyond the end of their careers."
Sikora reserved his fiercest criticism for the poor state of cancer services in the UK, saying the nation spends more on medicines for constipation than cancer drugs.
Britain spent only 1 pound on cancer drugs per person, compared with 2.3 pounds in France and 2.9 pounds in Germany. An estimated 200 million pounds extra would be needed each year to get UK cancer drug prescribing up to the European average.
Sikora asked politicians and public alike to assess how much they are willing to spend for a month of reasonable quality of life using new drugs like the taxanes. "The National Health Service currently limits this to about 1,000 pounds, although nowhere is this figure openly discussed."
He recalled that well-conducted studies showed that survival in Britain from the four most common cancers--lung, breast, colorectal and prostate--is significantly poorer than in many other European countries.
Although delays in diagnosis and treatment are common in the UK, Sikora said, he doubted these were the main reasons for the poor survival rate. "More likely it is a combination of the overall quality of surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and their coordination."
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