Cancer rates on the rise

Lung cancer is the No 1 killer in Hutou village in the coal-mining area in Xuanwei, Yunnan province. [Photo by Huang Xingneng / For China Daily]

Poor diagnosis and a lack of trained medical staff are barriers to the proper treatment.

When Zhang Qing started to work at the Beijing Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine in the early 1990s, "cancer" was a strange word to most people. Many could not tell the difference between a tumor and a cancer, recalls the oncologist.

Now the situation has changed.

"Everyone knows about cancer, and everyone is frightened by the word," Zhang says. "People think cancer means death."

The doctor has witnessed a rapid increase in cancer patients at the hospital in recent decades.

The world registered 14 million new cancer cases and 8.2 million deaths in 2012, and the numbers for China were 3.07 million and 2.2 million respectively, according to the World Cancer Report 2014, released by the World Health Organization earlier this year.

China accounted for about 22 percent of the world's new cancer cases in 2012 and 27 percent of cancer deaths globally.

The figures released by China's authorities are even higher.

In early 2013, an annual report issued by the National Central Cancer Registry estimated there were 3.12 million new cancer cases and 2 million cancer deaths annually on the Chinese mainland, which means one death from cancer every six minutes.

The figures were based on data collected for 2009 in 2012 from 72 cancer surveillance sites in 24 provinces, covering 85 million people.

The latest data states that China had 3.09 million new cancer cases in 2010, and about 1.96 million deaths, according to Chen Wanqing, deputy director with the National Central Cancer Registry.

"The cancer situation in China is too complicated to be simply summarized," Chen says.

Lung, liver, stomach, esophageal and colo - rectal cancers are the top killers in China, with lung cancer killing 490,000 annually.

Breast, lung, thyroid, colorectal, cervical and pancreatic cancers are rising sharply, and the main causes, Chen concludes, are an aging society, industrialization and life-styles.

In 2011, the death of breast-cancer patient Yu Juan drew wide attention to the killer disease.

The 33-year-old university teacher in Shanghai got a late-stage diagnosis in 2009. Later she started blogging about her triumphs and setbacks in her fight against cancer, to raise awareness of the disease among the public, and younger women in particular.

Breast cancer has become the most common cancer among Chinese women, with more than 160,000 cases detected a year. The incidence is rising at between 3 to 4 percent annually, and most cases are found in big cities, according to a study GE Healthcare China released in 2013.

Unhealthy lifestyles are partly to blame for the rising incidence, notes Wan Donggui, a breast cancer specialist with China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing.

High-fat diets and a lack of exercise can cause estrogen to rise to abnormal levels and increase the risk of breast cancer. Young women in big cities live under great pressure, and many of them choose not to have children or have them later in life. This also increases the risk of breast cancer, Wan explains.

Another cancer that has had an upswing in cases is cervical cancer, due to lifestyle changes, according to Chen.

The main cause of cervical cancer is the infection of the human papillomavirus, or HPV. In the past 10 years cervical cancer has been on the rise, especially in urban areas, because people are exposed to sex earlier and tend to have more sexual partners, Chen says.

The overall cancer rate in China stands at 235.23 out of 100,000, which is low worldwide. But compared with developed countries, such as the United States, China has relatively high death rate - 148.81 per 100,000 people in 2010.

The lack of adequate cancer diagnosis, as well as limited treatment capacities in less developed areas, greatly contributes to the problem, experts say.

Li Jian, director with the thoracic surgery department at Peking University First Hospital, says many of his patients are those whom other hospitals have refused to treat - either because their diagnosis is too late, or because their situation relapses and becomes too hard to deal with.