Some 150,000 Vietnamese people die from cancer each year. But late detection of the disease is being blamed for half of those deaths, according to statistics from the Ho Chi Minh City Cancer Association.
Statistics showed an average 200,000 Vietnamese people contract cancer annually. In Ho Chi Minh City alone, the number is 5,500-6,000; with mostly lung, liver and stomach cancers for males and breast, cervical and lung cancers for females.
Cancer has become one of the biggest killers in Vietnam, along with road accidents and HIV/AIDS.
Vietnam is also home to some of the world’s highest rates of lung, stomach, liver and blood cancers.
The World Health Organization (WHO) says that cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide: accounting for 7.9 million deaths, or around 13 percent of all deaths in 2007.
WHO statistics showed about 72 percent of all cancer deaths in 2007 occurred in low- and middle-income countries.
According to the HCMC Tumor Hospital, the number of cancer patients is rising year by year. In 2006, the hospital received 2,637 cancer patients, but that number climbed to 3,500 in 2008.
HCMC Cancer Association chairman, Doctor Nguyen Chan Hung, said the major contributors to cancer are the air we breath and what we eat everyday.
According to the Health Ministry, the degradation of the living environment is one of the major reasons for the increasing number of cancer cases in Vietnam.
Air pollution and tainted food have raised fears about a darker reality of cancer in Vietnam.
The WHO said tobacco use is the single most important risk factor for cancer. More than 40,000 Vietnamese die from smoking-related diseases each year, quadruple the number of traffic fatalities, according to the WHO.
WHO said Vietnam has one of the highest smoking rates in the world with 56.1 percent of men and 1.8 percent of women being active smokers.
Doctor Hung quoted the WHO as saying more than 30 percent of cancer deaths can be prevented if cases were detected and treated early.
However, most Vietnamese patients discovered they have cancer when the disease is in its latter stages, hampering efforts to cure it.
Doctors say it is because Vietnamese people do not undergo enough periodical health checks.
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