Cancer in Africa

Abstract

Africa was the birthplace of mankind, and Homo sapiens and his ancestors were confined to the African continent for most of their evolutionary period, before migration began to other areas of the world some 140,000 years ao. As a result, there is more genetic diversity between populations living within the African continent, than between Africans and the rest of mankind. Africa also demonstrates a very wide range of environments - with respect to climate, vegetation and zoology (including micro-organisms and human parasites). One might therefore expect a correspondingly wide diversity of cancer patterns, the study of which would be illuminating to our understanding of the causes of human cancer.Until quite recently, knowledge of cancer patterns in Africa was based mainly on the work of pioneering clinicians and pathologist5s. The clinical and pathological case series which they described enriched the literature in the 1950's and 1960's, but comparisons based upon relative frequency of differenct cancers in case series can be misleading. To evaluate differences in risk between populations requires incidence rates, derived from population-based cancer registries, which aim to record information on all new cases of cancer occurring in a defined population. Cancer in Africa includes a description of all cancer registration activity ongoing in Africa today, as well as in the past.