Europe spends 124 billion Euros a year on treating cancer, a major conference has heard.
The biggest spender is Germany, the European Society for Medical Oncology conference in Vienna, Austria, heard.
And the lowest spending is in Lithuania, where just 32 Euros a year per head is spent on tackling the disease. This compared with 165 Euros per head in Germany.
The biggest spend in the continent is on breast cancer, which consumes six billion Euros a year. But lung cancer takes a greater toll – costing the continent some 19 billion Euros, when the impact of early deaths is taken into account, researchers said.
The estimate of 124 billion Euros includes loss of economic productivity – from illness – and the cost of informal care as well as direct costs to health services.
Dr Ramon Luengo-Fernandez from the University of Oxford, UK, said: "Cancer poses a considerable economic burden not only to healthcare systems but to other areas of the economy, including productivity losses through early mortality and time-off-work, and relatives who have to forego work/leisure to care for cancer patients.
"Healthcare systems will have a good idea, I expect, of the healthcare costs of providing cancer care to their patients. However, the productivity losses and informal care costs associated with cancer will be less well understood and their magnitude less appreciated."
* The conference also heard the findings of research into cancer prevention. This showed a reluctance to acknowledge the effect of personal choices, such as smoking, on cancer risk as well as misconceptions.
Professor Hans-Jörg Senn, of St. Gallen, Switzerland, chair of the ESMO Cancer Prevention Faculty, said: "These studies highlight the fact that a large proportion of the European population does not particularly like the idea of self-responsibility for personal cancer prevention – that is, changing their habits and lifestyle accordingly. Rather, they blame genetics and society for getting cancer."
* A third study claimed patients around the world are failing to get access to essential pain-relieving drugs.
Doctors need access to seven opioid medications – but very few countries provide these, the conference heard.
The research involved 76 countries.
Professor Nathan Cherny, of the Shaare Zedek Medical Centre, Jerusalem, Israel, chair of the ESMO Palliative Care Working Group, said: “Unrelieved cancer pain is a cause of major worldwide suffering, not because we don’t have the tools necessary to relive pain, but because most patients don’t have access to the essential pain-relieving medication."
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