What are the challenges to effective cancer control?
1. The first challenge in the fight against cancer is :
First, the challenge is to improve prevention to limit the cases of cancer. We know that smoking, high-fat foods and alcohol abuse can cause cancer. Of course, consumer campaigns have changed habits. Indeed, consumption is decreasing.
However, we can still make efforts to optimize. First of all, we can reinforce prevention by more examinations. We are seeing a real increase in progress. However, there are still major concerns. We need to prevent childhood cancers early and help their parents. To date, parents of sick children are often at a loss. First of all, the administrative files are time-consuming and often complicated. Also, parents are not taken care of psychologically or, if they wish, they have to pay for the consultations. As for the financial part, some parents have to leave their job to take care of their sick child.
The article below is very interesting: a little boy and his parents are fighting a brain tumor together.
2. The second challenge in the fight against cancer:
This is the challenge to improve the care to be provided to patients. We realize that there are disparities in treatment and tools between hospitals in France. Some get more financial aid to benefit from state-of-the-art equipment. This same equipment can be acquired sometimes 5 to 10 years later by many other hospitals such as the PET-SCAN.
Cancer patients cannot be left out of the pandemic. During the first wave of Covid-19 that led to the first containment (March/May 2020), many patients had urgent operations postponed as well as appointments necessary for their follow-up.
It is estimated that about 5,000 cancer patients died in France during the first containment. Not because they had caught the coronavirus but because they were denied access to care in time. In addition, many cancers were diagnosed far too late in 2020 for these same reasons. Add to this the fear of being infected in the hospital setting, which again may increase excess mortality of cancer patients in the coming months and years.
3. The third challenge in the fight against cancer:
This is the necessary challenge to offer to people in remission, then cured, so that they can have the most normal and fair life possible. It is necessary to prevent former patients from serious risks of depression with a better accompaniment by professional psychologists. But it is also necessary to facilitate the return to work. Some patients lose their jobs due to prolonged work stoppages of several years. Moreover, this is explained in detail in the article “consumer loans”: Little by little, certain decisions taken by the government aim at reducing the major differences in treatment that exist between people who have been cured of cancer for many years and those who have been lucky enough to have always been healthy.