Cancer represents a challenge of increasing scale in the region: Do we have high-quality information to confront it?

Abstract

Cancer is an enormous problem around the world. The International Agency for Cancer estimates that more than 19 million new cancer cases were diagnosed, and almost 10 million cancer deaths occurred in 2020.

Around 670000 cancer deaths are registered in Latin America annually. Cancer is the second cause of death after cardiovascular diseases in most countries and is the first cause of premature death in many of them.

Human, sanitary and socio-economic impacts and the increasing scale of these figures shock our countries. Yet, our region has limited human and material resources to address this problem and notorious and persistent inequalities in health access. Governments confront an enormous challenge.

Reliable and detailed information is necessary for cancer control programs. It is impossible to carry out the situation diagnosis,  design and implement cancer control programs and assess their impact without reliable and stable Population Based Cancer Registries (PBCR).

Population-Based Cancer Registries cover just 23.3% of the Latin-American population, and only 2.4% is covered by high-quality Population Based Cancer Registries, according to Global Initiative for Cancer Registration – IARC

Authors

• Enrique Barrios Registro Nacional de Cáncer, Motevideo, Uruguay https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6608-8605