On World Cancer Day, professor hails 'tremendous progress' made so far

Monday marks World Cancer Day, a chance to take stock of progress in the global fight against the disease. Professor David Khayat, of Paris’s Pierre and Marie Curie University says “the progress has been tremendous” in terms of cancer knowledge and how to fight it since he began his own career 45 years ago and since the inception more recently of World Cancer Day. Khayat provides the example of cancer cases in France. In 2000, he tells FRANCE 24, there were 280,000 new cases of cancer and 150,000 cancer deaths. Seventeen years later, in 2017, the number of new cases had grown to 400,000, but the number of deaths remained stable at 150,000. “We are curing more and more patients,” Khayat says. There are 18.1 million new cancer cases around the world every year and one in six deaths – about 9.6 million – are a result of the disease, the World Health Organization said in a report released for World Cancer Day.