Cancer is a very important topic with eight million deaths, more than eight million deaths, and fourteen million people living with cancer; it’s a huge issue. Cancer kills more people than malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, road traffic deaths and homicide combined. There’s a lot of work out there. We’ve made huge progress in the last two or three decades. Cancer is not the death sentence any more it once was; it’s not a fatality. We start understanding a lot about the causes of cancer – tobacco, physical inactivity, alcohol abuse as well as viruses and we start understanding more about how to screen, detect and treat cancer. So there’s a lot to do and the World Health Organisation stands ready to do more. We want to help countries get plans, comprehensive plans, around cancer that include all of these different areas and help them strengthen their health systems so that cancer is an integral part of that. We need to strengthen data collection systems, we need to strengthen prevention treatment and palliative care.

We’ve launched a new guideline on cervical cancer which was the result of a huge amount of work bringing together the international community and brings a cheaper and effective way of addressing cervical cancer. This has the potential to save lives.

It’s just the beginning; once we get a document out like that there’s a huge amount of work to communicate around it, make sure it reaches its audience and then it’s being implemented.