Medical experts, scientists call for greater equality in healthcare access

Providing medical resources and equal medical opportunities to everyone is the ultimate solution to improving the health of the general public, world-leading life science experts said during a forum held in Shanghai on Wednesday.

Themed "the battle between immunity and cancer", the forum was part of the Fourth World Laureates Forum, an event jointly held by the WLA and the China Association for Science and Technology to facilitate high-level dialogue in the international scientific community.

Japan's Tasuku Honjo, a recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to immunotherapy, said that humans may be confronted by greater challenges arising from cancer when they live longer.

"Different social sectors need to pay attention to the situation of aging as the aging population is also the largest community suffering from cancer," said Honjo, who joined the forum via video linkup.

Roughly one in five individuals today are potential cancer sufferers and the ratio is likely to rise, said experts.

Last year, new cancer patients numbered 19.3 million worldwide, while 9.96 million people died because of the disease.

In China, the number of new cancer patients was 4.57 million in 2020, accounting for nearly 24 percent of the world's total. The number of individuals dying of cancer in the country last year was 3 million, nearly one-third of the world's total.

Chinese experts, including Fan Jia, president of the Zhongshan Hospital Affiliated with Fudan University, Dong Chen, director of the Shanghai Immune Therapy Institute, and Zhang Wenhong, director of the infectious diseases department at Huashan Hospital Affiliated with Fudan University, were in attendance at the forum, which was supported by pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb.

The company said that it is aiming to help China achieve the goal of increasing the overall cancer survival rate by 15 percent by 2030, as stipulated in the Healthy China 2030 Initiative.