health tips

Energy efficient light bulbs could pose UV-risk to skin, trigger migraines

Starting in January, traditional incandescent bulbs will be on their way out the door. A 2007 bill is setting new efficiency standards for light bulb manufacturers, stating that 40 watt bulbs must draw just 10.5 W, and 60 W bulbs can only draw 11 W.

So how does this translate? Essentially, it means that incandescents will be going dark, while newer compact fluorescents (CFLs) and LED bulbs will be lighting up.

While this move is ultimately meant to conserve the nation’s available energy, the transition may actually not be so beneficial in other aspects. Broader use of CFLs may actually come with some unwanted health risks – most notably in regards to people’s skin.

The danger lies in the CFL design. Current fluorescent bulbs house a small tube of liquid mercury, and when the light is turned on, the incoming electricity changes some of that mercury into gas. This excited vapor emits invisible ultraviolet (UV) light, which is then absorbed by the bulb’s phosphor coating. The coating serves two purposes, both re-emitting the UV rays as visible light and shielding human skin from harm.

“Ultraviolet light is similar to the ultraviolet wavelengths found in natural sunlight, and we do not want huge amounts or extra amounts of ultraviolet light on our skin because it can cause biological effects that can lead to cancer,” Dr. Elma Baron, director in the lasers and photomedicine department at UH Case Medical Center in Cleveland, told FoxNews.com. “I think the chance of that happening, having UV light emission from the new bulbs, is only present when there is a defect in the coating.”

However, it seems that these defects are a definite possibility. A 2012 study from Stony Brook University found that the twisty CFL bulbs, which also use mercury, are much more likely to leak UV light compared to traditional fluorescent bulbs.

According to the research, many of these bulbs “have cracks in the phosphor coating, probably due to the fact that the coating is brittle and has trouble making the tight bends required to make these bulbs compact,” explained the study’s lead author Miriam Rafailovich, a professor of materials science and engineering at Stony Brook.

As a result, the researchers found that exposure to CFL bulbs caused damage to healthy human skin cells, similar to damage seen from ultraviolet radiation. However, it remains unclear how much exposure to a cracked CFL bulb is enough to cause serious adverse health effects.

“When you’re talking about skin effects of light, it all has to do with wavelength; what’s the wavelength being emitted?” Baron said. “A 5 Joule of UVA light may not do anything, but once you get to a 20 Joule of UVA, that might cause some redness or alter some processes in the skin. So it’s a matter of dose, and I don’t think anyone has quantified what the dose is through one of those sources if something is cracked.”

Another concern surrounding CFL light bulbs has to do with their potential to trigger migraine headaches. According to Dr. Mark Green, director of the Center for Headache and Pain Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, current fluorescent lights are reviled by many migraine suffers, who claim certain forms of lighting can prompt painful attacks.

“The reality is [fluorescent lighting] rarely does trigger migraines, but it’s possible, and the reason for that is there is a flicker rate – the lights fire off at a certain rate,” Green told FoxNews.com. “The way we trigger migraines in the lab is to give people a strobe effect, using high density lights at a high flicker rate… So we don’t like fluorescent lights in migraine people in general.”

Green said that most migraine sufferers enjoy incandescent lighting, since it doesn’t produce any flickering sensations and has a nice warm feel. But with this change, it’s going to be harder for individuals to avoid fluorescent lights, and for the 1 or 2 percent of people who experience migraines, CFLs may exacerbate their symptoms.

“We’re all going to be living in a world of fluorescent light,” Green said. “So what we do as doctors, since we can’t change the world, we just try to treat the migraines more aggressively. When you use preventive migraine therapy, you reduce sensitivity of that part of the brain. We can’t change the trigger but we can try to change the brain’s response to the trigger.”

Fortunately, there is still an option for people worried about the potential health effects from CFLs. Considered to be the future of bulb technology, LED lights don’t contain any filaments that will burn out, and they don’t heat up very much either. Instead, they are illuminated by the movement of electrons in a semiconductor material, causing no flickering and emitting almost no UV light.

Yet, there’s a catch. LED lights are much more costly for consumers, with a six-pack of 60-Watt LEDs from Cree selling for $77.82 – $12.97 each. So if you’re looking to make the switch to LEDs, it may burn a few holes in your pockets.

Source: News.nom

Three killed in attacks targeting Pakistan’s anti-polio programme

Two policemen and a polio worker were killed Friday in attacks on polio teams and their police escorts in Pakistan, authorities said.
A policeman was killed and another injured when unidentified gunmen fired on a polio security team in Swabi, in northwest Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, District Police Officer Sajaad Khan told CNN.

One policemen, Ijaz Ali, was killed immediately, while the second, Iftikhar Ali, died a few hours later at a hospital. Both were shot in the head, said an officer who saw their bodies.

Swabi is the hometown of Khalid Sheik Haqqani, a senior Taliban official. The officers were there to protect polio workers, who have come under increasing attack in the past year.

The second victim, a polio worker, was shot dead by unknown men in Jamrud, in Pakistan’s tribal Khyber Agency, an official said.
Unidentified gunmen on a motorcycle killed polio vaccination team member Muhammad Yousaf Afridi near his house. He was killed
while returning from dispensing oral polio drops to children, said Muhammad Asif, a local official.

Pakistani cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan, who heads the Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, condemned the targeting of polio workers in a statement released by his party.

Khan called on Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s chief minister and the federal government to take “strong action” to arrest those responsible and to provide security for polio workers.

The PTI party holds the majority of seats in the coalition running Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s provincial government. Militants have targeted anti-polio campaigns in Pakistan since U.S. intelligence officials used a fake vaccination program to help in their hunt for Osama bin Laden in 2011.

Under cover of the programme, the CIA sought to collect DNA samples from relatives of the al Qaeda leader to verify his presence in a compound in Abbottabad.

More than 20 polio workers have been killed since July 2012. Some mullahs have also preached against the polio campaign, claiming falsely that the oral vaccine leaves Pakistani children sterile.

Last year, a Taliban commander in northwest Pakistan announced a ban on polio vaccines for children in the region as long as the United States continued its campaign of drone strikes.

Pakistan stepped up its eradication efforts after cases spiked in 2011, but cases continue to be diagnosed. At least 16 cases of polio have been reported this year in Khyber Agency.

Polio, which can cause permanent paralysis in hours, remains endemic only in Pakistan, Nigeria and Afghanistan.
Among those strongly opposed to the polio drops project is Mullah Fazlullah, who was recently appointed to head the Taliban after his predecessor was killed in a drone strike.

In June 2012, the Taliban announced its opposition to polio vaccination efforts. Since then, there have been more than two dozen deaths involving vaccination teams and their security details.

Source: Big News Network

Healthy eating costs an extra $1.50 per day: study

That healthy foods cost more has become conventional wisdom, but a new study is the most thorough yet in calculating how much more: about a dollar and a half.

“Before now, we’ve seen studies looking at prices of one or a few foods or diets, in one city and from one store,” said Mayuree Rao. “And the results have been mixed, with some studies finding that the healthier options cost more and some studies finding they don’t.”

Rao is a junior research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and a medical student at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She led the study that was published in BMJ Open.

The research team identified 27 previous studies from 10 countries that met their inclusion criteria and reviewed each of them. Fourteen studies were conducted in the U.S, two in Canada, six in Europe and five in other countries including South Africa, New Zealand, Japan and Brazil.

Twelve of the studies were market surveys that evaluated the prices of anywhere from two to 133 foods each and included up to 1,230 stores.

Fifteen studies were dietary surveys that ranged from 30 participants to more than 78,000.

The researchers compared the costs of the healthiest eating patterns with the least healthful and found that the healthiest diets cost on average $1.47 more per day based on actual food intake, or about $1.54 more per day for every 2,000 calories consumed.

The studies in the review used various definitions of “healthy” – including comparing the amount of fat or sugar in similar products, or comparing whole grain versus refined carbohydrate versions, or looking at total fruit and vegetable intake or overall calories.

But all the findings were consistent across current standards for healthy eating, such as the Mediterranean diet, or Harvard’s Alternative Healthy Eating Index.

The researchers also compared price differences in food groups – healthier meats and proteins had the largest difference between healthy and unhealthy choices – about 29 cents more per serving.

It’s important to consider what an extra $1.50 per day can mean for individual as well as family budgets, according to Rao.

“It translates to about $550 more per year for one person, and that could be a real barrier to healthier eating. We need better policies to help offset these costs,” she said.

“On the other hand, $1.50 is about the price of a cup of coffee – just a drop in the bucket when you consider the billions of dollars spent every year on diet-related chronic diseases like obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. When you look at the long-term health impact, the extra $1.50 is a good investment,” she said.

Rao says that determining why healthier diets are more expensive is certainly an interesting topic for more investigation.

“Other research from our group has observed that over the past century, the U.S. has developed a complex system of farming, storage, transportation, processing, manufacturing, and marketing that favors a lower cost of highly processed foods,” Rao said. “We just don’t have the same system to support healthier foods like fruits and vegetables.”

That extra daily cost can be a burden for low-income families said Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington’s School of Public Health. He was not involved in the new research, but some of his work was included in the review.

“An additional $1.50 represents a 15-25 percent increase for the average American,” Drewnowski said. “It does not sound like much but low-income families spend about $6 on food. So here, $1.50 represents a 25 percent increase.”

“Also remember that $1.50 per person per day represents $540 per year, or $2,200 for a family of four. When you multiply by 200 million American adults (I am being conservative here), you get a total cost of 108 billion dollars – more than the entire USDA budget for food assistance,” he told Reuters Health in an email.

Drewnowski points out that dollar figure is about the same as the estimated cost of obesity to society, said to be on the order of $100 billion per year.

“So – are we asking consumers to spend another 108 billion in order to eat healthier? I wish they would, but I am not optimistic. At the very least we need a recognition that nutrition education needs to be accompanied by some economic measures,” he said.

Drewnowski thinks the main problem is that empty calories have become extremely cheap.

“Sugar, refined cereals and vegetable oils have made the food supply relatively inexpensive. However, those foods provide calories and (sometimes) few nutrients – so that obesity and hidden hunger can coexist,” he said.

“Subsidizing healthy foods and taxing unhealthy foods are evidence-based ways to address the price imbalance and nudge people towards a healthier diet. These are strategies that policymakers in many countries should be looking at,” Rao said.

Source: updated news

U.S. states affected by deadly pig virus now at 20 – USDA

Nebraska has become the latest U.S. state to be hit by a deadly pig virus, bringing the total number of states affected to 20, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said this week.

The Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus (PEDv) had never been reported in North America until May, when it was discovered in the United States.

The virus has fueled market concerns that U.S. hog supplies will decline steeply next spring and summer.

PEDv causes diarrhea, vomiting and severe dehydration. Hog epidemiologists have found that a large number of very young piglets infected with the virus die.

While the disease has tended not to kill older pigs, mortality among very young pigs infected on U.S. farms is commonly 50 percent, and can be as high as 100 percent, according to veterinarians and scientists studying the outbreak.

To date, more than 1,500 cases, each of which could represent thousands of infected animals, have been reported in 20 states across the Hog Belt. The states include such major pork producers as Iowa, North Carolina, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

As defined by the USDA, each diagnostic case could represent multiple animals at either a single farm site or several locations. The USDA’s National Animal Health Laboratory Network released its latest pig virus data on Wednesday.

Nebraska, the sixth-largest pork production state, had 1.35 million hogs spread over 2,200 operations as of Sept. 1, according to USDA data.

The spread of the disease has heightened scrutiny of the U.S. trucking industry, as livestocktransportation vehicles have been targeted as a possible means of transmission.

The National Pork Board has issued biosecurity guidelines urging transporters to clean, disinfect and dry vehicles that are used to transport pigs and hogs.

The guidelines also include stricter standards for handling of manure by producers and commercial haulers.

Source: Godlike productions

Flu vaccine prevented 6.6 million illnesses last year, says CDC

According to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), flu vaccines prevented 6.6 million illnesses and 79,000 hospitalizations last year. Health officials urge people to get flu shots to prepare for upcoming “peak” months of this flu season.

Federal health officials are urging all Americans six months and older to get the flu vaccine in preparation for this year’s flu season, after evidence showed that the vaccine protected more people against the disease last year.

Last year’s flu season was more severe than recent seasons, according to findings by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The season started earlier than expected, causing 381,000 people to become hospitalized and 169 children to die from the flu last year.

There is good news, however. Although the virus impacted many lives, the flu vaccine also prevented millions more from becoming ill.
“We estimate that during last year’s flu season, flu vaccination prevented 6.6 million people from getting sick with flu, 3.2 million from going to see a doctor and at least 79,000 hospitalizations,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Tom Frieden said in a CNN article Thursday, calling the findings on the flu vaccine and protection “eye-opening”

Although Friden explained the importance of getting vaccinated, less than half of Americans — 40 percent—have gotten the flu shot this year. To put the findings by health officials into perspective, if 70 percent of Americans had gotten the flu vaccine last year, another 4.4 million cases of flu and 30,000 hospitalizations would have been prevented. As the flu season begins to pick up across the country, especially in some Southeastern states, Frieden and other health officials now use the data to urge people to get vaccinated.

“We know that it will increase in the coming weeks and months, but we cannot predict where and when and how severe this year’s flu season will be,” Frieden stated in an article for WebMD. “What we can predict is that the best way you can protect yourself against flu is to get a flu vaccine. “It’s not too late to get vaccinated.

CDC’s Center for Global Health Director Dr. Anne Schuchat also spoke of the importance of getting vaccinated as soon as possible, noting that flu season typically peaks between January and March. She also explained that it was particularly important for children to get the flu shot.

“Already, three children have died this year from the flu,” Shuchat said in an article for CNN. “We hate to see anyone die from the flu, but particularly children. I really urge parents to make sure their children are vaccinated.”

Source: digital journal

AbbVie drug shows promise against difficult type of breast cancer

Patients with so-called triple negative breast cancer appeared to have double the response rate to the regimen containing AbbVie’s veliparib in a new type of study

Women with an especially deadly type of breast cancer who received a treatment regimen containing an experimental AbbVie Inc drug prior to surgery are likely to have a significantly better response than those who get a standard chemotherapy regimen, according to data from a clinical trial.

Patients with so-called triple negative breast cancer, who tend to be younger and have a very poor prognosis, appeared to have double the response rate to the regimen containing AbbVie’s veliparib in a new type of study that exploits advances in molecular understanding of the disease, researchers found.

The trial dubbed I-SPY 2 is another step toward developing more personalised treatments. Its design allows researchers to continuously monitor how patients respond as the trial progresses and move patients into arms of the study testing drugs from which they are more likely to gain benefit.

This type of trial should help companies select the right group of patients to enroll into larger, more traditional late stage clinical trials, potentially cutting the cost of bringing new medicines to market.

Drugmakers are under increasing pressure to cut the cost of new medicines that put a huge burden on healthcare systems. One way to do that would be through more efficient, alternative testing methods that lead to fewer trial failures.

“It’s a very nimble trial design that allows you to enroll a fairly small number of patients and come to a fairly high certainty of success (in later larger trials) in a specific subset of patients,” explained Dr. Hope Rugo, who presented the data at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium on Friday.

If a drug combination starts to look like it is working better on patients with one type of breast cancer, the trial design allows for more patients with that type of cancer to move into that arm of the study, said Rugo, director of breast oncology and clinical trials education at the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center in San Francisco.

The US Food and Drug Administration, which signed off on the trial design, has said that if a study drug helps cure significantly more cancers, it could be given a provisional type of accelerated approval.

Faster development, reduced cost

“If we can get a better idea of who benefits early, it’s going to be an enormous change in the way we test new agents, and not just for breast cancer but for other malignancies as well,” Rugo said.

“You could avoid doing a 3,500 patient trial in a group of patients who you thought might benefit but don’t,” she said. “We’ll be able to get the drugs to the patients who need them much more quickly and at reduced cost.”

The I-SPY program is testing a variety of experimental medicines from several drugmakers in the neoadjuvant, or pre-surgery, setting in high-risk patients. Rugo was presenting the portion of the trial that involved the AbbVie drug.

In that arm of the study involving 71 high risk patients, the researchers were testing to see whether the treatment, given before surgery, could eliminate any evidence of invasive cancer in breast tissue and lymph nodes removed during subsequent surgery – a measurement known as pathologic complete response (PCR).

They found an estimated PCR in 52 per cent of women who were treated with AbbVie’s veliparib plus the chemotherapies carboplatin and paclitaxel. That compared with a 26 percent PCR rate in those who just got standard paclitaxel. Both groups also received anthracycline-based chemotherapy prior to surgery.

“If we can increase the number of patients who have no invasive cancer, we expect that this will translate into better survival,” Rugo said.

Most breast cancer tumors are estrogen-receptor positive, fueled by the hormone estrogen. About 20 per cent are HER2-positive, meaning a protein called HER2 is prevalent. A third type is driven by the hormone progesterone. All of these have potentially effective treatment options even after recurrence.

Triple-negative tumors – about 15 per cent of breast cancers – lack estrogen, progesterone or HER2 receptors needed for most drugs to work. If the tumor does not respond to chemotherapy, there are currently no alternatives and the typical survival rate after recurrence is less than two years.

More women treated with veliparib and carboplatin dropped out of the study due to side effects, whereas discontinuations in the control arm were primarily due to disease progression.

Rugo said she looked forward to further study of the AbbVie drug, noting that the trial design did not separate which effects were due to veliparib and which to carboplatin.

However, she said, the doubling of response rates was “very encouraging to us and suggests that veliparib is playing an important role in the enhanced response that we’re seeing.”

Source: Khaleej times

Singing may ease COPD symptoms

 

Researchers found that regular singing helped COPD patients breathe more efficiently and easily.

Patients with COPD, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, may soon get a new prescription from their health care providers: Singing. A new study has found that belting out a tune can help ease the symptoms of COPD and improve breathing for its sufferers.

Globally, about 64 million people suffer from COPD, according to a new report from the BBC. COPD is a lifelong condition that is caused by damage to the air sacs and passages that make up the lungs. For those affected by the disease, every breath is a challenge. The World Health Organization expects COPD to be the third leading cause of death by 2030.

But a new long-term study on COPD from Canterbury Christ Church University in Kent may bring some respite to those with the disease.

The study has found real benefit to COPD patients who practice singing on a regular basis.

Dr. Ian Morrison, a senior research fellow and one of the project’s authors, said: “Lung function improved dramatically, particularly after about five months, once people had got used to what they were doing and changed their breathing habits,” he said. “To get such an improvement really was quite remarkable.”

Why would singing make it easier for people to breathe? Researchers think the act of singing helped COPD patients inhale without anxiety, taking deeper breaths and clearing the lungs more efficiently than they would if they were simply concentrating on their breathing and taking short “gaspy” breaths. Singing allows patients to breathe in a deeper and more relaxed manner.

The study looked at the breathing patterns of 100 patients with varying degrees of COPD. They attended weekly singing sessions over a 12-week period. Breathing was assessed at the beginning and at the end of the study using a spirometer, something similar to a giant breathalyzer. Patients with COPD generally have about 50 percent of the lung capacity as patients without the disease, and they generally continue to lose lung capacity over time.

Researchers hoped to show that weekly singing session halted the progression of the disease and kept patients at the same level of lung capacity as before they began singing. But they actually found that most of the patients in their study improved on the spirometer after the year, showing more lung capacity than they had at the beginning of the study.

“In our study, we not only appeared to halt the decline but people showed a small improvement,” said Morrison.

Source: Twitter

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds For the Better

How technology boosts our cognitive abilities — making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever before It’s undeniable: technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson votes yes.

The Internet age has produced a radical new style of human intelligence, worthy of both celebration and investigation. We learn more and retain information longer, write and think with global audiences in mind, and even gain an ESP-like awareness of the world around us. Modern technology is making us smarter and better connected, both as individuals and as a society.

In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson documents how every technological innovation — from the printing press to the telegraph — has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But as in the past, we adapt, learning to use the new and retaining what’s good of the old. Thompson introduces us to a cast of extraordinary characters who augment their minds in inventive ways.

There’s the seventy-six-year-old millionaire who digitally records his every waking moment, giving him instant recall of the events and ideas of his life going back decades. There are the courageous Chinese students who mounted an online movement that shut down a $1.6 billion toxic copper plant.

There are experts and there are amateurs, including a global set of gamers who took a puzzle that had baffled HIV scientists for a decade and solved it collaboratively — in only one month. But Smarter Than You Think isn’t just about pioneers, nor is it simply concerned with the world we inhabit today. It’s about our future.

How are computers improving our memory? How will our social “sixth sense” change the way we learn? Which tools are boosting our intelligence — and which ones are hindering our progress? Smarter Than You Think embraces and interrogates this transformation, offering a provocative vision of our shifting cognitive landscape.

Source: Amazon

Study: Taking A Picture May Not Make The Memory Last Longer

Please, no photos: Snapping pictures of an event or item may not help you remember it later, new research shows.

Researchers took 28 people on a tour of Fairfield University’s Bellarmine Museum of Art in Conn. They were asked to look at 15 different objects and take photographs of 15 others.

The researchers also asked 46 subjects to look at 27 artifacts. They were instructed to examine nine of them, photograph nine others, and photograph a particular portion of the object on another nine artifacts.

The next day the subjects were quizzed both verbally and visually about what they saw. They remembered less about the actual object when they photographed it than when they just stared at it.

However, those who took detailed photos remembered the whole item better, even if the pictures did not pay attention to the other areas.

“These results show how the ‘mind’s eye’ and the camera’s eye are not the same,” lead author Linda Henkel, a psychology researcher at Fairfield University, said in a press release.

Henkel told LiveScience that she got the idea for the study after seeing people at the Grand Canyon snapping pictures without pausing to take in the view.

“It occurred to me that people often whip out their cameras and cellphone cameras to capture a moment and were doing so almost mindlessly and missing what was happening right in front of them,” she said.

Henkel believes that people experienced the “photo-taking impairment effect” because they had counted on the technology to store the experience, not their own mind.

“When people rely on technology to remember for them — counting on the camera to record the event and thus not needing to attend to it fully themselves — it can have a negative impact on how well they remember their experiences,” she said in the release.

She pointed out that previous studies have shown that memory can be jogged by looking at photos, but only if the person peruses them — not if they just keep the snapshots.

This particular study didn’t allow people to select the photo subjects, so that may have played a role in what they remembered. Henkel’s next study will allow the subjects to choose what they photograph.

The study was published Dec. 5 in Psychological Science.

Source: digtriad

Cancer deaths rise to 8.2 million, breast cancer sharply up

The global death toll from cancer rose to 8.2 million in 2012 with sharp rises in breast cancer as the disease tightened its grip in developing nations struggling to treat an illness driven by Western lifestyles.

Cancer deaths were up 8 percent from 7.6 million in a previous survey in 2008 and breast cancer killed 522,000 women last year, up 14 percent in the same period, according to the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

“Breast cancer is also a leading cause of cancer death in the less developed countries of the world,” said David Forman, head of IARC’s Section of Cancer Information, the group that compiles the global cancer data.

He said this was “partly because a shift in lifestyles is causing an increase in incidence, and partly because clinical advances to combat the disease are not reaching women living in these regions.”

An estimated 14.1 million people developed cancer in 2012, up from 12.7 million in 2008. And 1.7 million women were newly diagnosed with breast cancer last year, up by more than 20 percent from 2008.

IARC’s report, called GLOBOCAN 2012, gives the most up-to-date estimates for 28 different types of cancer in 184 countries and offers an overview of the global cancer burden.

It found that the most commonly diagnosed cancers worldwide in men and women combined were lung, breast and colorectal cancers. The most common causes of cancer death were lung, liver and stomach cancers.

SUBSTANTIVE INCREASE

Projecting forward, IARC experts said they expected “a substantive increase” in cancer cases worldwide, with annual new cases predicted to rise to 19.3 million by 2025 as the global population both grows and ages.

Worldwide trends show that in developing countries going through rapid societal and economic change, the shift towards lifestyles more typical of richer industrialized countries leads to a rising burden of cancers linked to reproduction, diet and hormones.

The IARC report said cancer incidence – the number of new cases each year – has been increasing in most regions of the world, but noted what it said were “huge inequalities” between rich and poor countries.

While rates of new cancer cases are still highest in more developed regions, death rates are relatively much higher in less developed countries because people’s tumors are often not detected and diagnosed early enough due to a lack of screening and access to treatment.

“An urgent need in cancer control today is to develop effective and affordable approaches to the early detection, diagnosis, and treatment of breast cancer among women living in less developed countries,” said Christopher Wild, IARC’s director.

He said it was critical to bring rates of disease and death in poorer countries in line with progress made in recent years in treating and curing some cancers on wealthier countries.

One stark example of the inequality is in cervical cancer – which kills hundreds of thousands of women in Africa each year but can be largely avoided with a vaccine or successfully treated if it is picked up early enough with screening.

In sub-Saharan Africa, 34.8 new cases of cervical cancer are diagnosed per 100,000 women each year, and 22.5 per 100,000 women die from the disease. That compares with 6.6 and 2.5 per 100,000 women respectively in North America.

“These findings bring into sharp focus the need to implement the tools already available for cervical cancer, notably HPV vaccination combined with well organized national programs for screening and treatment,” Wild said.

Source: reuters