Stephen Lewis isn't quitting the AIDS fight.
In fact, his battle to eradicate the disease in developing countries is as fervent as ever. But there's another quiet killer the former UN envoy for AIDS in Africa is urging Canadians to mobilize against: cancer.
By 2015, one out of two people in Canada will have had cancer at some point in their lives. He urgently pointed this out during his lectures for the Control Cancer Campaign, which ended its campus tour Wednesday night at the University of Toronto. The non-communicable disease isn't on the agenda for the G20 meeting to be held in Toronto this summer, though cases of it are ballooning in developing countries, he told his audiences. He spoke with The Globe and Mail about why we should mobilize to prevent (not necessarily cure) cancer and why he's spreading this message to university students.
There are so many campaigns against cancer – why get behind this one? And why are you targeting young people?
This campaign focuses on prevention. And I was stunned by the numbers, the proposition put by the World Health Organization and others that 40 to 50 per cent of cancers could be prevented, 40 to 50 per cent of deaths could be prevented. I believe that there exists on university campuses a tremendous amount of idealism and energy and focus and capacity to mobilize and get involved. And [I hope that] from the campuses of Canada there could flow outwards the energy to raise awareness, raise consciousness, get people engaged in conversations and understand one of the most unsettling truths of all that cancer is not a disease of the aged – cancer is increasingly a disease of young people.
And your own family has been touched by cancer – your wife Michele Landsberg is a breast-cancer survivor, your father died of leukemia.
Yes, Michele's cancer's now gone 13 years, thank God. She's a full and strong survivor. And it's good to be able to convey that to an audience and say a) if you catch it early you can overcome it, but b) that we've got to prevent the cancer. And there, I'm able to draw some analogies with HIV. The extraordinary work that has been done on the ground to rally people to a cause – how important it's been, for example, to involve people living with AIDS in activism so the patients and survivors of cancer must equally be involved in the activism.
How else are you using lessons from your HIV-AIDS activism for this cancer campaign?
I want to talk to them a little bit about possibly using the law. We have international conventions, which Canada has ratified, that guarantee people “the highest attainable standard of health.” The incredible inventiveness of the campaigns in southern Africa, where they use the courts to force governments to provide money and to provide intervention on AIDS treatment and care, we've not used that here.
Why is this a fight to “control cancer,” not cure it?
It's the evolution of the way we respond to these issues. In AIDS, we finally get four to five million people in treatment after an heroic struggle to pull it off. And now the focus shifts to “what do we do about prevention?” It's so frightening, you're looking desperately for a cure, you're throwing money into research – I would never diminish that. But how do you focus on prevention? In the last recording of stats from 2008, we have 171,000 new cases in Canada of cancer and there were 73,500 deaths. Now there's something appalling about the fact that we could prevent fully 50 per cent of those cases of death. So why aren't we doing that?
We learned yesterday that Wimbeldon champ Martina Navratilova has breast cancer – she's a fit, active athlete. How do you fold that into the message of prevention?
I remind [students] that there are questions of tobacco and alcohol and nutrition and sun exposure and tanning centres and talk to them a little bit about the environmental things like cosmetic pesticides on the one hand and the occupational exposure to asbestos and endless carcinogens in the workplace. I remind them that unlike AIDS, there are vaccines. There's the HPV vaccine and there are hepatitis B and C vaccines. We have a capacity here to really prevent large numbers of cancers. And what has to happen, I think, is that all of those preventative factors have to come into play.
You tell your audiences that cancer isn't in the Millennium Development Goals. Why should it be?
Cancer's spreading terribly in the developing world. Isn't it strange that in this panorama of global health that the non-communicable diseases that cause such carnage and are everywhere to be found, increasingly in the developing world, compromising life, compromising the future, that they're not being addressed?
Do you think the fight against cancer will become as big as the battle against AIDS?
Only if there is tremendous advocacy and the forces are really rallied. Universities are often a basis for that and those ideas. It's a good place to start because there's so much energy. I don't know whether it needs that or whether it will come to that. And I don't ever want the AIDS dimension to be usurped. I personally will never allow that to happen so long as I'm able to resist it. But I do see room to pursue the non-communicable diseases which as I say they are rising in such quantum in developing countries.
It's off the topic of cancer, but do you think Canada should get involved in the conflict in the Congo?
The problem with the Congo, in a nutshell, is that all of the interventions ostensibly arranged by the United Nations have failed because none of them have been taken seriously by the Security Council or by the UN agencies. It's just appalling. I can't see us sending a contingent into the Congo, frankly.
