Health ministry “not paying much attention to this drama”
Portugal is suffering “an epidemic of cancers” in young adults – and, up till now at least, the Ministry of Health is “not paying much attention to this drama”.
These words came from SIC Eixo do Mal talk show journalist/ commentator Luís Pedro Nunes, who was basically acting as a conduit for the director of the Oncology at Santa Maria Hospital in Lisbon. (Luís Pedro Nunes’ partner was recently diagnosed with cancer, aged just 36).
According to Nunes, the director of oncology sought him out to say: “Help us. There’s a problem here” – as this is clearly a subject that is not being widely discussed.
Eixo do Mal airs a little before midnight, thus not that many people will have seen Nunes’ intervention.
It came right at the end of the programme which had been energetically discussing the country’s political situation. In fact, Nunes only got two minutes of air time (and looked impatient as one of his colleagues was still talking about the perceived dangers of the far right).
The panel’s host referred to “a serious matter: young people more and more with cancer” that Nunes wanted to talk about – and out it all came;
“This is a subject in which I am personally involved. The director of oncology at Santa Maria came to me and said “help us. We have a problem. The case of Kate Middleton sounded a warning, but there is an epidemic of cancers among young adults. It is something, he said, that was expected post- Covid” (due to the State health service effectively shutting down/ not performing any kind of screenings for cancers during the pandemic), “but the sheer quantity of young people who are developing cancers right now is inexplicable”, said Nunes.
“In his case, in Santa Maria, the very little ward there is simultaneously treating 6,000 cases”, Nunes continued, adding that the cancer specialist stressed that with all the other issues being dealt with, the Ministry of Health is not paying attention to what is “a drama”.
To be fair, the health ministry must be aware of the situation: the National Oncological Registry warned of the pandemic’s negative impact on provision and cancer care and research, stressing that all the delayed screenings/ diagnoses and treatments of the pandemic era would almost certain to lead to “an increase in cancer morbidity and mortality in the coming years“; and little more than a week ago, a Business Insider analysis emerged attesting to the “sharp rise in the rate of young adults getting cancer before age 50”.
Young adults are showing up with more aggressive cancers and in advanced stages. “Young people who seem relatively healthy are being diagnosed with advanced-stage cancers” – and researchers are at a loss to explain this recent phenomenon, said the journal.
As one doctor Business Insider spoke with explained, specialists are coming up against cases that are “exceptions; that you can’t explain” (in other words, that don’t tie in with a poor lifestyle/ family history of cancers. “There’s something else at play here as well that we need to understand better,” Dr David Liska told Business Insider, which adds that this worrying trend “can be seen in several more developed countries, particularly in the G20.
Of particular note are the USA (35.4% more cancer in people under 40 between 1975 and 2019) and the UK (22% increase in people under 50 since the 1990s).
Conversely, cancer diagnosis and death rates in older people are falling.
Back in 2022, a study started the ball rolling on the notion of an “epidemic of cancers”, especially among young people born after 1990.
It identified 14 of the most common types of cancer: breast, esophagus, gallbladder, kidney, liver, bone marrow, pancreas, prostate, stomach and thyroid. And among these 14 types of cancer, 8 are related to the digestive system.
The study suggested some reasons: changes in diet, lifestyle, obesity, environment and microbiome, which can interact with genome and/or genetic susceptibilities.
But as the cancer specialist interviewed in Business Insider’s article suggests, there has to be something else at play. ND
Source: SIC Notícias/ ZAP Notícias (https://zap.aeiou.pt/)
