The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) was founded by a Resolution of the World Health Assembly in September, 1965. At that time, although data were sparse, cancer was widely considered to be a disease of developed high-resource countries.Now, the situation has changed dramatically with the majority of the global cancer burden found in low-resource and medium-resource countries.It is estimated that in 2000 almost 11 million new cases of cancer were diagnosed worldwide, 7 million people died from cancer, and 25 million persons were alive with cancer.The continued growth and ageing of the world's population will greatly affect the future cancer burden. By 2030, it could be expected that there will be 27 million incident cases of cancer, 17 million cancer deaths annually, and 75 million persons alive with cancer. The greatest effect of this increase will fall on low-resource and medium-resource countries where, in 2001, almost half of the disease burden was from non-communicable disease.Currently, the most common forms of cancer differ between high-resource countries and the remainder. In high-resource countries, cancers of the lung, breast, prostate, and colorectum dominate. In low-resource and medium-resource countries, cancers of the stomach, liver, oral cavity, and cervix dominate. The pattern is changing rapidly with large increases in many parts of the world where lung, breast, and colorectal cancer have been historically uncommon.
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