Image: Photograph by Christopher Churchill
In Brief
- Nearly two thirds of the 7.6 million cancer deaths worldwide occur in low- and middle-income countries, but a mere 5 percent of the world’s cancer resources are spent on patients there.
- Global health pioneer Paul Farmer and his group Partners In Health have joined a global task force that wants to marshal support for cancer care and treatment in these countries.
- Partners In Health has begun to develop programs in Malawi, Haiti and Rwanda, which collaborate with Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals to provide a full range of care to patients in these resource-poor settings.
By 2020, 15 million people worldwide will have cancer and nine million of them will be living in developing countries, according to World Health Organization estimates. Harvard University physician and medical anthropologist Paul Farmer is determined to ensure that prediction doesn’t come true. Farmer, a pioneer in global health, has a history of tackling big problems. His Ph.D. dissertation on HIV in Haiti ran to 1,000 pages, leading Harvard to impose a cap. Since then, as co-founder of the nonprofit Partners In Health, he has brought medical treatments, from basic primary care to antiretroviral therapies for AIDS, to millions of the world’s poor.
Farmer’s work—chronicled in the Tracy Kidder best seller Mountains beyond Mountains and in his own books—has inspired governments and global agencies to do likewise. Recently he has focused his attention on cancer in the developing world, where the disease is increasingly common and costly treatments are often hard to come by. In the medical journal the Lancet last October, he and a team of other leaders from the Global Task Force on Expanded Access to Cancer Care and Control in Developing Countries announced an ambitious, multipronged plan to increase these countries’ access to cancer medical resources—by raising money, driving down the cost of drugs, and figuring out new ways to get those drugs to patients in need. Science writer Mary Carmichael spoke with Farmer at his office in Boston. Excerpts follow.
This article was originally published with the title Not Just an Illness of the Rich.
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3 Comments
Add CommentI appreciated the interview and especially Paul Farmer's work in alleviating disease in developing countries.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHowever, in addressing disease and especially cancer, the old canard that a ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is especially applicable. The closest Farmer got to mentioning prevention was in advocating vaccines to prevent infections that cause cancer.
Somehow, both Mary Carmichael (the interviewer) and Farmer somehow avoided addressing the world-wide prevalence of smoking and other tobacco use in the developing world. Smoking decreases in the USA and other Western nations have radically reduced the incidence of lung cancer especially for men. Meanwhile multinational tobacco companies have targeted their marketing resources toward the billions of the world's poor, leading to more cancer and other tobacco-caused morbidity and mortality.
This problematic approach is clear in Farmer's statement "I don't like the term 'lifestyle,' but some of the risk factors but some of the risk factors for cancer such as exposure to viruses and pollutants or toxic chemicals are more widely prevalent, and that increases the incidence." However collective and individual choices affect the quality of peoples' environment and health as well as their longitivtiy.
When tobbacco companies own controling shares in the worlds largest food companies and have entire divisions dedicated to potency and addictiveness research and advertising, do you really thnk that even international organizations can afford to risk their funding by offending these funding power-houses by telling the truth?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@bucketofsquid
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYES, and its now happening!
MAGIC MAGEE AND C A N C E R
I am led to believe, from experiments, that the influential orbital speed of Magee’s nuclei is a bit slower than the orbital nuclei of our body cells. A cancer cell is a cell that has its orbiting nuclei sped up to the point where this cell is forced to divide within healthy, packed cells. I can say that using Magic Magee will stabilize and slow nuclei orbital speeds of both healthy and cancerous cells. In just a few hours the body has these treated cells back to normal body cell speed (re: Burn and Cure).
I suspect that whatever is causing this nucleus abnormality is still present so a Magee treatment plan would be established.
A cancerous cell is a cell and it too requires nourishment. These fast orbit nuclei feed on faster food than that which normal cells of the body feed on. The cause of cancer is its food; there comes a time where these dividing cancer cells run short of nourishment and desperately look for another fast food source. This source is body fat. The big problem is that the orbit speed of fat is again faster, promoting expeditious cell division. Even after death, hair continues to grow. The reason for this is that faster than normal cell orbital nuclei promotes cell division. Forces of equal evolution act upon forces of equal evolution and by administering poison (chemotherapy) the orbit nuclei speed is slowed, hampering cell division. Chemo also affects healthy cells causing nutrition to now be a predator, creating a new disease. Without forced cell division within the hair follicle the hair dies and falls out. Once a cancer cell starts feeding on body fat the orbit nuclei speed is increased enough to affect the orbital nuclei speed of a healthy cell making that healthy cell a cancer cell! At this stage the body is robbed of its fat and fat being the body’s safety from fast nutrition, fast nutrition is now predator not prey, and kills the body. For you to properly understand this paper you will need to know my science.
cbc.ca bruce voigt