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Europe’s patient advocates skill up to better influence cancer care and research agendas
Patient advocates for a wide range of cancer communities across Europe spent four days at the start of July honing the skills they need to influence the policy, research and healthcare decisions that matter to them. This was the second…
Precision medicine for all!
Every year, around 2.3 million people across the globe are diagnosed with breast cancer. For lack of access to the right diagnostic test, many of them are being treated with chemotherapy that is doing them more harm than good –…
Cancer drugs for Africa… from Africa?
More than two years ago, Cipla Quality Chemical Industries, a pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Kampala, Uganda, announced that it would start producing cancer drugs. In a deal agreed in 2021 with the Ministry of Health, the company, which is part…
Cancer care in Ukraine, one year on
I make two appointments to speak to Anna Uzlova of Inspiration Family, a Kyiv-based foundation set up in September 2020 to support adult cancer patients. The first time the interview cannot take place because Uzlova is going to visit family…
The cancer patients still struggling to access drugs in the wake of anti-corruption reforms
Miriam Espinoza, a food vendor from Michoacán, Mexico, still remembers the day she received her cancer diagnosis in 2019. After months of waiting for a CT scan and several visits to gynaecologists, who told her that the lump in her…
Immunotherapy: outcomes of ultra low-dose trial offer hope for better global access
Doctors at the Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai have shown that an ultra-low dose of the immunotherapy drug nivolumab significantly improves survival in patients with recurrent or newly diagnosed head and neck cancers. The findings of the single-centre phase III…
Helping cancer patients preserve their fertility in one of Europe’s least supportive states
It was the end of the first pandemic summer, when Edyta, a 35-year-old active entrepreneur from Łódź, Poland, received an email informing her that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer metastasised to the lymph nodes. Naturally, her first thoughts…
A call to action: how Poland is stepping up for Ukraine’s cancer patients
February 24, 2022. Julia, a lawyer living near Kiev, is counting down the days until her last chemo. After which she will still face surgery and radiation therapy on her way to recovering from breast cancer. Before dawn, she wakes…
Unicorns for Ukraine: mobilising to meet patients’ changing cancer care needs
When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, consultant clinical oncologist Mohammed Hojouj put out a call for help: “Cancers do not stop growing because there is a war. But cancer patients stop being seen as a priority.” The story he…
Sri Lanka cancer care hit by foreign currency crisis
A shortage of essential cancer drugs caused by financial crisis is threatening to dampen Sri Lanka’s success in treating cancer as part of a free health service. The country is facing its worst economic crisis since 1948, with huge foreign…