The Rising Global Cancer Pandemic: Health, Ethics, and Social Justice (2)

Cancer is the first or second cause of death in 134 countries, the leading cause of death in most high-income countries, and the leading cause of death by disease in American children. An estimated 19.3 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed across the world each year, and this number is expected to rise to 24 million by 2035. Most of the increase will occur in low and middle-income countries-the countries least capable of confronting the cancer pandemic or of affording costly therapies.
Cancer is unjust. Striking inequalities are seen within and between countries in cancer incidence and survival by race, ethnicity, and socio-economic-status. Survival is much higher among the wealthy than among the poor. Outcomes are much more favorable among Whites than among Blacks and Latinos. The goal of this conference is to elucidate these inequalities and to examine the forces responsible for them through the lenses of both science and ethics.
Hosted by the Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good in the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society in partnership with the Theology Department of the Morrissey College of Arts and Sciences, this conference marks the start of the third year of the increasingly popular minor in Global Public Health and the Common Good at Boston College. It will build on the success of our 2019 conference on Ethical Challenges in Global Public Health: Climate Change, Pollution and the Health of the Poor. It also marks the 50-year anniversary of the National Cancer Act signed into law by the U.S. President Richard M. Nixon in 1971.
The conference will bring together a distinguished group of scholars-from Boston College, across the United States, and internationally-in ethics, law, public policy, economics, global public health, and cancer prevention to examine the ethical challenges facing global cancer control in the 21st century.
The conference will fill an important gap in the debates and literature on the cancer pandemic. Despite the clear connections between global public health and social justice, there has been surprisingly little scholarly exploration of the ethical challenges that confront global cancer control. We anticipate that this conference will advance the emerging field of global health ethics.