legation of Chinese health officials, political leaders and executives arrived at Yale a day late after a grueling 48-hour trip, but that did not derail a conference on controlling China’s rapidly increasing cancer rates and other serious public health problems.
Yale School of Public Health researchers are working with the International Prevention Research Institute (IPRI) and Chinese officials to establish the Comprehensive Cancer Center in Daqing, China. One of the many projects in Daqing is a landmark longitudinal study that will follow 300,000 people to assess the association between the many environmental and lifestyle risks facing the Chinese population.
“We paid a big price for economic growth in terms of people and land,” Tongzhang Zheng, professor and division head of Environmental Health Sciences said in his opening remarks on the public health challenges faced by modern China. He illustrated the stunning rate of change in his native country first with a photograph of monkeys in a tree gazing at the sunset. This was followed by a photograph of the same location taken 20 years later, showing the Chinese National Theatre, a dome of titanium and glass, reflected in a manmade lake.
Peter Boyle, president of IPRI, noted that 40 years ago cancer was believed to be a disease of industrialized countries—which did not include China. “Today one quarter of cancer distribution is found in China,” he said. In fact, there are now more deaths from cancer in China than from tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria combined. Similar statistics prevail for other diseases associated with the developed world such as diabetes and heart disease. These studies, Boyle emphasized, will have significant impact for other countries just beginning to grapple with shifting disease and mortality patterns that accompany rapid economic development.
Ping Zhao, director of the China National Cancer Institute and Hospital in Beijing, outlined the primary risk factors which lead to many cancer deaths among men in urban China. They include an aging population, widespread tobacco use, environmental pollution and infections such as hepatitis.
Since 2004, China has laid a framework to address this growing epidemic. More than 100 cancer registries have been formed, interventions, early diagnosis and treatment programs have been ramped up and mass screenings have reached 300,000 people. In the next 20 years the goal is to save 1 million cancer patients’ lives to improve the quality of cancer patients’ survival Zhao said.
The Comprehensive Cancer Center is fully supported by the city government, represented at the conference by Deputy Mayor Shulan Fu. The city has a population of 2.8 million people and is home to the country’s largest oil field, producing 40 percent of the nation’s land-drilled oil.
Brian Leaderer, the Susan Dwight Bliss Professor and deputy dean at YSPH, emphasized how critical it is to the success of these ventures to have the city’s political and industrial leaders involved in planning and implementing population-based studies such as the Daqing Cancer Cohort Study, the multi-center birth cohort study and training programs for scientists.