Cuba launches campaign on World Cancer Day

HAVANA, Cuba, Feb 2 (acn) On the occasion of the World Cancer Day, celebrated every February 4th, Cuba will develop for the seventh time a campaign of education, prevention and diagnosis of pre-malignant and malignant skin lesions.

Dr. Olaine Gray, National Coordinator of the Skin Cancer Task Force of the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP by its Spanish acronym), told ACN that the campaign called Mole Day in Cuba will be held this Friday from 9 am in different parts of the country.
This active research includes polyclinic hospitals, factories, labor centers, military units, schools and institutions, the specialist said.
For several years, in Cuba as in the rest of the planet, skin cancer ranks first among the locations of higher incidence, so that in that date, in many nations, dermatologists are united in a common research activity, Dr. Gray notes.
She warned that the incidence increases in Cuba with about 9000 patients per year, although mortality is low, and only the diagnosis in the early stages allows the real cure of the disease.
The most common are the Basal and Squamous Cell Carcinomas, and the Melanoma, the latter the most aggressive, causing 80 percent of the deaths from cutaneous cancer in the world, she stated.
All of them have as main triggering factor the excess of sun, specifically ultraviolet radiation, warned the also head of the Dermatology department at Havana´s Comandante Manuel Fajardo Hospital.
For this reason she recommended avoiding sun during the most intense radiation hours, from 10 am to 5 pm, wearing dark-colored clothes, and using hats and dark umbrellas.
The campaign will deal with how we can apply what we already know in the areas of prevention, early detection, treatment and care, and it is an opportunity to raise awareness that there is much that can be done at the individual, community and government levels to prevent this evil.
Annually, almost three million people are diagnosed with cancer in the Americas and 1.3 million die, half of them prematurely, that is, before age 70.
For this reason, Pan American and World Health Organization estimates that if no action is taken, new cases of oncogenic tumors could increase by 30 percent in the next decade.
The earlier the diagnosis is made, the better the prognosis, Dr. Olaine Gray said.