Cancer in Sub-Saharan Africa: The need for new paradigms in global health (original) (raw)

Cancer now ranks as the leading cause of death globally, outpacing mortality rates for HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis combined. Cancers and other noncommunicable diseases (NCDs), in particular, are quietly taking center stage in many lowand middle-income countries in sub-Saharan Africa and worldwide, and these countries are projected to carry as much as 80 percent or more of the global cancer burden by 2030. Yet, there are severe inequities in the response to this burden, and many patients diagnosed with cancer are unable to access comprehensive cancer care simply because of where they live. In policy and advocacy circles, cancer is often seen as too challenging and expensive to treat in low resource settings, and funding and priority-setting for cancer has fallen substantially behind the current disease burden in sub-Saharan Africa. This is an often repeated narrative in global health, with the HIV/AIDS epidemic serving as an especially telling example of how inaction can fuel...