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)