200,000 risk developing cancer yearly: Expert
200,000 risk developing cancer yearly: Expert
JAKARTA (JP): At least one out of every 1,000 Indonesians are
at risk of developing cancer every year, according to Melissa L.
Luwia of the Indonesian Cancer Foundation.
Melissa, the director of the foundation's Center for Early
Diagnoses, told a recent seminar in Malang, East Java, that
cervical cancer was the most common in the country.
If detected and treated early, cancer can be cured, she told
the 200 seminar participants.
Indonesia's population currently stands at 200 million.
Melissa said cancer could strike anyone, but those over 40 are
considered to most susceptible, as are those who smoke, either
actively or passively. She said active smokers are 20 times more
likely to develop lung cancer and, once they get it, are usually
more difficult to treat.
Heavy drinkers also have the potential to develop cancer of
the mouth, throat, and digestive tract. The odds are not good
either for those whose diet consists mainly of fatty foods; these
people are at risk from breast, prostate and cervical cancer.
Melissa also warned against consuming foods with additives,
having multiple sexual partners, or over-exposure to the sun's
rays.
Early in May this year, the World Health Organization warned
that chronic illnesses such as cancer and heart disease, leading
killers in rich countries, will strike hundreds of millions of
people in developing nations in an unfolding global epidemic.
"The outlook is a crisis of suffering on a global scale," WHO
Director-General Hiroshi Nakajima said.
Some 24 million people die every year from chronic conditions,
nearly half of the global total of deaths. Circulatory diseases
such as heart attacks kill 15.3 million people a year, cancer in
all its forms accounts for 6.3 million people.
The WHO's 1997 world health report warns that cancer cases
will double in developing countries, and jump by 40 percent in
richer ones with about 15 million people expected to develop
cancer by 2020, compared with about 10 people a year presently.
Although life expectancy has dramatically improved this
century -- to an average of 65 years in 1966 -- increased
longevity is a mixed blessing, and sometimes even a curse, as
older people are typically more prone to diabetes, cancer and
other chronic ailments.
Third World citizens, who have traditionally been more at risk
from infectious diseases, are increasingly vulnerable to chronic
sicknesses as well, creating what the WHO calls a "double burden"
of suffering.
"Already, the outlook for most individuals in the developing
world is that if they do manage to survive the killer infections
of infancy, childhood and maturity, they will become exposed in
later life to noncommunicable diseases, " the organization says.
(swe)