Survival to cancer is scarce if you are poor, it's that simple

This week has celebrated the World Cancer Day, and millions of people continue to die around the world every day. This disease is one of the greatest dangers that humanity faces and is wreaking havoc across the globe. Fortunately, over time, survival is improving in a multitude of cancer cases, although there are data that make us think that survival to this disease is scarce if you are poor, as simple as that.

Studies have detected a pattern of disturbing behavior: survival to cancer is directly proportional to the purchasing power of the patient, for example: one of the most terrible, the brain tumor, has a survival rate of 80% in Sweden, 76% in the United States, 60% in Spain, 41% in China, 36% in Mexico and 29% in Brazil.

That is, the richer the country you live in, the better your chances of survival. This tendency was found in all types of cancer in the analysis carried out by the persons responsible for the study (study based on data collected from 37 million patients in more than 70 countries), led by the Italian epidemiologist Claudia Allemani.

According to the conclusion of the study, the existence of this inequality is unacceptable, which means that progress in the fight against cancer only benefits patients with greater purchasing power and wealthy countries. After this study many specialists have agreed to denounce this inequality, being a protest of this type rarely intense and unanimous as it has been.

The complaint explains that rich patients are those who take advantage of the best therapies and the best diagnoses, having a better prognosis in the long run. Some of the new therapies against cancer are extremely expensive and are only available in first world countries. These bulky prices cause a real problem being literally the difference between life and death for common people.

The ESMO president, Josep Tabernero says that the profit margins obtained by pharmaceutical companies are not sustainable anywhere in the world and it's necessary to open a debate to discuss what the fair price of medicines is. This new study has also warned that there are inhuman disparities between the white and black population, in the United States it has been detected that in some types of cancer there are up to ten points of difference between the healing of one race and the other. The only reason to explain this difference is an economic reason.

In 1978, WHO (World of Health Organization) announced that it was launching the Health for all program with the aim of achieving full health in the year 2000, but the objective to date has not been met. Since the beginning of this initiative, critical voices were raised, mainly from pharmaceutical companies, which argued that primary care was expensive and too ambitious to achieve it but in reality this initiative contemplated a massive loss of dividends in the health business that were not willing to accept.