The Infectious Disease ~ Cancer Connection: Partnering with Uganda
The World Health Organization estimates that chronic infectious diseases cause more than 20 percent of all cancers in the world, including liver, cervical and gastric malignancies. Given that infection-related cancers are more frequent and often more severe in people infected with HIV, in resource-poor Uganda, the HIV epidemic is fueling a 20,000-fold upsurge in Kaposi’s sarcoma in adults and Burkitt’s lymphoma in children! Both are disfiguring cancers with abysmal survival rates due to lack of access to early diagnosis and treatment.In response, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has recently awarded a $500,000 grant to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to aid in the establishment of the first American cancer clinic and medical-training facility in Africa. The institute is being constructed at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, and on the campus of the Makerere University College of Health Sciences. The grant renews support for the 43 year old Uganda Cancer Institute and it's many proactive efforts to develop and promote novel treatments and cancer prevention efforts in Africa.
"Up to one-quarter of the world’s cancers are attributable to chronic infections,” Hutchinson Center physician-scientist Corey Casper, M.D., M.P.H., scientific co-director of the Uganda Program on Cancer and Infectious Diseases, explained. “Better understanding the link between infectious disease and cancer provides a unique opportunity to reduce cancer-related suffering and death in both resource-rich and resource-poor regions.”It is the hope of Dr. Casper and Dr. Jackson Orem, Director of the Uganda Cancer Institute, that this partnership
"will benefit the world by identifying new infectious causes of cancer, new ways to prevent infection-associated cancers such as through the development of new vaccines, and new ways to treat such cancers with nontoxic drugs, thus avoiding the need for chemotherapy."Citation: (2010). Hutchinson to Build First US Cancer Clinic and Training Facility in Africa. Cancer (0008543X), 116(7), 1618-1619. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.
Labels: Africa, Burkitt's lymphoma, cancer, chronic infectious diseases, global health, Kaposi's sarcoma, Uganda, WHO
posted by Ann Celestine @ 1:01 PM
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