The World Health Organization (WHO) has introduced a major new collaborative effort called the Global Breast Cancer Initiative with the aim of reducing global breast cancer mortality by 2.5 % per year until 2040.

The Initiative was presented during the advocacy event which was named “Hearing the call of women with breast cancer”.

Speaking during the event WHO’s director of department of non-communicable diseases Dr Bente Mikkelsen said though there has been substantive progress in the reduction of breast cancer mortality among high income countries, there is little progress made in low and middle income countries in the last two decades.

Dr Mikkelsen believes the higher mortality in these lower income countries is as a result of late stage diagnosis and inadequate access to quality care.

He said Collective efforts are required to address this unacceptable inequity.

In most high income countries Breast cancer survival five years after diagnosis now exceeds 80% compared with 66% in India and just 40% in South Africa.

The WHO says, the premature deaths and high out-of-pocket expenditure that arise when breast cancer services are unavailable or unaffordable result in social disruption, impoverishment, family instability and orphaned children and also threaten economic growth.

The importance of addressing this situation has become all the more urgent given that breast cancer has now overtaken lung cancer as the world’s mostly commonly-diagnosed cancer, and is responsible for one in six of all cancer deaths among women.