I’m Gordon McVie, editor of ecancer and I’m reporting on the conference of the UICC in Melbourne, sunny Melbourne. Those of us from the northern hemisphere are enjoying the ambience and the heat which is fantastic.

This is really one of the best conferences that UICC has ever put on, mainly because they’ve got the political heavyweights to come and share in the meeting. The first evidence of that was the pre-conference meeting which was called A World Summit, which was maybe a little bit pretentious, but actually the main leaders of the government agencies from many countries and the not for profit sector are also there; economists were in great evidence and the topic was the economics of cancer care. Everybody is aware of the fact that we are going exponentially steadily on high in terms of cancer incidence and something has to be done about that otherwise we’ll all be broke – high income countries, low income countries. This is particularly frustrating at a time when we’re now really able to control cancer better than ever before. So a mixture of delegates from low, middle income countries and high income countries.

There were really healthy debates about what was affordable care and what was not affordable. The conclusion from all the speakers was that if we don’t start investing in preventing cancer then we’re going to run out of money very quickly. So prevention is under-served and prevention research is the Cinderella, not just at government but also the big cancer charities are seduced by the genomes and the proteomes and are not leaving much money left over for prevention research. And there’s a lot of evidence that prevention works. We talked about the great success story which is the fall in smoking in men and the subsequent fall in lung cancer and the subsequent fall in lung cancer deaths in men. The advent and dissemination of two really potent vaccines, one has been around for a long time and is frequently overlooked, the hepatitis B vaccine. Hepatitis B leads as a major contributor to liver cancer and just even ten years ago the vaccine was unaffordable. It has now come down in price big time and we expect the same thing to happen with the other important vaccine, that’s cervix cancer vaccine, that’s HPV. So there’s HBV and there’s HPV. So we now have a situation where we’ve got two potent weapons and the challenge is dissemination, getting those vaccines out there to the people who need them most and for both of those cancers, liver cancer and cervix cancer, the major targets are men and women in developing countries. In developing countries there are 230,000 deaths a year from cervix cancer; in developed, well off countries it’s 1,000 or 2,000 in a year.

So that’s a big challenge and the people at this conference are just the people to make that all happen. It’s a mixture of the UICC which has got 800 or so charities, cancer charities, from all over the world as members and WHO. The UICC’s members are all charities so they don’t have a great deal of money and one would assume that the WHO would have a lot of money but the important department, the NCD, the non-communicable disease department, in my personal view, is ridiculously under-served and under-funded. They know what they have to do, they know what the challenge is, they know how to do it but they don’t have the money. It’s really interesting that several speakers brought the Ebola crisis, crisis in inverted commas, to the table. Ebola is taking all the headlines all over the world and the total death rate so far is around the 7,000 mark. No such headlines are being written about the 23,000 people who die of cancer each day; so 23,000 deaths per day versus 7,000 in the last year of the current Ebola outbreak. This has to change; politicians and health departments understand it but the finance directors don’t.

There was one really interesting discussion on the economic session about the economics of palliative care. The resounding conclusion was that it was an impudence, an impertinence, an irrelevance to talk about the cost efficacy of palliative care. Palliative care was a human right and of course it should be delivered as efficiently as possible and also as low cost as possible but that we should be having the finance directors deciding whether we can afford palliative care or not was a nonsense. Palliative care is, of course, particularly interesting for ecancer and I’m talking at this meeting about the twenty modules that we have published for the IAEA and these are targeted to sub-Saharan Africa. They’ve been seen by several hundred doctors in Africa and healthcare professionals and many have taken the entire twenty one hour long modules.  The Indian Palliative Care Association has seen this advantage and the way this has helped and is being useful in low income countries and ecancer will be off to India in February to film videos with experts in India using the same storybook developed in Cardiff University by Laura Findlay and Fiona Rollinson and we’re hopeful that we’re able to do other translations, for instance French, Portuguese and Spanish.

The big meeting was attended by 3,000 people; all the health professionals are here. They have separate meetings for the European groups and the Asian groups and the African groups but they also have separate meetings for the nurses; the international nursing societies are here and the palliative care people are here and the medical oncologists are here and the radiation oncologists are here. The epidemiologists play a large part here and it’s great to see IARC from Lyon, that’s the WHO’s research arm, contributing big time. Ecancer has interviews with most of the leading people: the director of the NCD, the director of IARC, the President of UICC, the future President of UICC and the past President of UICC. The bottom line is that there’s agreement on what needs to be done, we just need the resource and the willingness to collaborate and focus. The word needs to get out about these 23,000 daily deaths. Finance directors and governments have got to realise that this is just not an option; to fund or not to fund is a human need.

So congratulations to UICC for putting on an excellent meeting and I think that two years’ time in Paris we’ll see even further progress. That’s it from Melbourne.