SINGAPORE (AP) -- Women in Asia are likely to face increased risks of acquiring breast and cervical cancers in a region where screening and treatment remain too expensive for most, cancer specialists said Sunday.
Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer attacking women in Asia, followed by cervical cancer. Both can greatly be reduced by screening -- such as mammograms and pap smears that are routine in many Western countries -- and a new vaccine is proving to be highly effective against a virus that causes cervical cancer.
But most of these options are too expensive for many Asians.
"You have to tailor the screening program with what you can afford," said Dr. Donald Max Parkin, a research fellow at the University of Oxford's Clinical Trial Service Unit and Epidemiological Studies Unit, who spoke at a two-day conference in Singapore. "We can't have annual pap smears, it's too expensive. You need a much cheaper and simpler program."
He said self-examination could be promoted to help detect breast cancer, while pap smears could be given perhaps every five years, instead of annually. There also are cheaper, easier tests available that can help detect the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, or HPV, the main cause of cervical cancer.
About 385,000 cases of breast cancer occur each year in Asia, and about 266,000 cases of cervical cancer. As the population continues to age and increase, and as more Asians adopt Western lifestyles, those numbers are expected to climb sharply.
"Cervical cancer is an epidemic," Dr. Maurie Markman, vice president for clinical research at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, told The Associated Press on the meeting's sidelines Sunday. "It's not the death that's bad -- death is the blessing. It's an unbelievably painful death."
Markman said Asian countries must find a way to acquire the new HPV vaccine for girls and young women that has proven to be about 70 percent effective against viruses that can cause cervical cancer. But the three-shot vaccine is still extremely expensive even for many developed countries. It costs about US$350 in the United States.
"It's a cost issue, and it's an issue of figuring out how to get it (to) the young women in a matter that's consistent with whatever that culture is, whatever the geography is in that area," he said. "Those are the two things, and it's very important."
Dr. You-Lin Qiao, head of the Department of Cancer Epidemiology at the Cancer Institute and Hospital in Beijing, likened the HPV vaccine to a shot for hepatitis B that came out in the 1980s and helps prevent liver cancer. He said at first it cost more than the average Chinese made in one month, but two decades later it became affordable enough to include in the country's routine vaccination program.
"In China, over 80 percent of people don't have insurance at all. In that case, they don't have access," he said of the cervical cancer vaccine. "Even people who do have insurance, it doesn't cover the HPV vaccine."
The total number of all new cancer cases for men and women in the region is projected to balloon from 4.5 million in 2002 to 7.1 million in 2020 if nothing changes. Lung cancer remains the top killer for both genders.
