Preventing cancer: everyone’s job

As every year, at the dawn of February, World Cancer Day attracts global attention in an altruistic and necessary effort to undertake collective actions to raise awareness of this disease and, fundamentally, to reduce its impact on the nations of the world. According to the Pan American Health Organization, cancer represents one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality on the planet, whose burden will increase by approximately 60 percent over the next two decades, further impacting health systems, individuals and communities.

The day not only becomes a call for solidarity and understanding towards those who face this disease in all its forms, but also an incentive to promote its prevention, screening and early detection, timely treatment and palliative care, as well as to promote a healthy lifestyle and educate the population about cancer, its risk factors and the research that is being developed to combat it.

In this context, Cuban medicine shows the potential of its staff, carrying out important studies and materializing, among others, therapeutic vaccines such as CIMAvax-EGF and Vaxira and the monoclonal antibodies CimaHER and HeberFERON, which stand as great adversaries that, from the Island, fight against lung, head and neck and skin cancer, respectively, and which constitute innovative and highly effective oncological treatments.

This day is also the perfect setting for various activities aimed at raising the health culture of the population, increasing self-care and self-responsibility, encouraging early care in order to guarantee a greater chance of survival and a better quality of life and, above all, increasing the perception of the risk of this condition in society.

Under the slogan «For fairer care and a call to unite our voices and act», the International Union Against Cancer and the Pan American and World Health Organizations are mobilizing this year, for the 24th time, the global community in their fight against this disease, raising their voices and providing a space of necessary observance and media coverage, so that the magnitude of this disease is reduced and, ultimately, undermined.

Written by Yadiel Barbón Salgado.