Pacific receives funding to target cancers in region

HONOLULU – Pacific islanders are suffering higher rates of cervical cancer, while betel nut use is driving up oral and throat cancers in the region.

The University of Hawaii’s Cancer Centre has received targeting funding of US$6.6 million dollars to help curb these trends.

A Professor at the University of Hawaii’s Cancer Centre, Dr Neal Palafox says the federal grant is to help reduce disparity and cervical cancer was chosen as the Pacific has unusually high rates.

The Cancer Centre says the rate of cervical cancer in Micronesian women is eight times higher than for US women. Dr Palafox says no woman in the 21st century should die from cervical cancer.

“Cervical cancer takes a long time to manifest as cancer, it takes sometimes 15 years. If it’s caught early on it’s very simple to treat, but if it’s caught late it is very destructive and like many other cancers that are caught late are hard to treat.”

Dr Palafox says talking about a man or woman’s private areas can be culturally challenging and there can be language hurdles.“There is no word for cancer in many of the Pacific languages, so it takes many words to explain that. And there might not be in these populations the ability to understand many of the biological terms.”

An oncologist at the Cancer Center of Guam, Dr Sydney Welt, says access for many patients is a problem.

“The other islands don’t have any cancer doctors. In some cases the patients don’t go to the doctor even after they know they have masses or tumours that are growing.”

He says cancer rates for Micronesian women vary greatly, and with no screening available on the other islands, patients often present at the clinic with advanced disease.

The recent funding will to develop a betel nut quitting programme. Researcher John Moss says reducing betel nut use is difficult as it’s part of the culture.

“ One of the things that we learnt early on is to not convince people to quit, but just be open to their decision about quitting.”

He says early indications are the psychological quitting programme will be effective. The World Health Organisation says use of betel nut is growing at relatively alarming rates. The WHO’s technical officer for non-communicable diseases in Suva, Ada Moadsiri says betel nut is used by 54 per cent of adults in Palau and 65 percent of adults in parts of the Federated States of Micronesia.

“People are using the substance in social arenas and it’s a way of feeling included, much in the way that tobacco use really had spread in earlier decades and even till now.”

The WHO is concerned that a large proportion of people are now combining betel nut use with tobacco.

Ada Moadsiri says both substances are known carcinogens and using them together worsens their impact and heightens addictiveness.

She says betel nut use is also thought to exacerbate diabetes and increase the likeihood of heart attacks. - RNZI