HEALTH-SERBIA: Cancer Link with Stress Suggested

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Apr 22 2003 (IPS) - The incidence of cancer has risen three times in Serbia in the past ten years, a new health study shows.

The study suggests that prolonged stress caused by the political situation in the days of former president Slobodan Milosevic could have contributed to this rise.

“We can call it a silent cancer epidemic,” says Prof Miodrag Djordjevic from the Medical School of Belgrade University. Djordjevic is author of the new study ‘Atlas of Malignant Diseases in Serbia’ along with Prof Momcilo Babic and epidemiologist Ana Jovicevic Bekic from the Belgrade Oncology Institute.

“Each year we discover 30,000 new cases of cancer, three times more than a decade ago,” Djordjevic says. “It’s a high number for a population of 7.4 million that has remained constant over that period.” Djordjevic and his group say there are now 145,000 registered cancer patients in Serbia and Montenegro.

The Atlas is the first study of the health of Serbs under Milosevic’s rule. He fell from power in October 2000.

In the decade since 1991, he led the country into four wars, topped with 11 weeks of NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) air raids in 1999. Two rounds of international sanctions to add to the four wars devastated the economy of this once prosperous nation.

While there are no definitive and direct links between cancer and a political situation, experts are looking at circumstantial links. “One can describe prolonged stress as a situation where a person finds that he or she can do nothing to control his or her daily life and has no possibility to predict what is going to happen tomorrow,” psychiatrist Vladimir Adamovic told IPS. “That is how we lived in the nineties.”

Some 100,000 people die each year in Serbia, 60 per cent of them from coronary and related diseases, and 20 per cent from cancer.

The authors conclude that prolonged stress among the population, poor living standards and bad habits, accompanied by lack of preventive work have led to the poor health situation among Serbs.

“Science says that only 10 per cent of cancers are genetically related,” Bekic says. “The rest can be attributed to outside factors like stress, smoking, or poor eating habits.”

The most frequent types of cancer among men are lung and colon cancers, while breast and cervical cancers top the list among women.

The experts agree that smoking is a serious contributor to cancer. “Serbs are among the top five smoking nations in Europe,” Bekic says. “We are also on the top of the European list of lung cancer incidence.”

The authors have found no link so far between the rise of cancers and the NATO bombing with weapons using depleted uranium.

The experts say Serbs are generally negligent about their health. “There is absolutely no awareness among Serbs about what is healthy food,” Bekic says.

“Traditionally, it’s red meat and fat. What science calls a healthy diet with a lot of fruit and vegetables is usually described by Serbs as ‘food for the sick’.”

In some parts of Serbia, high blood pressure and coronary disease at the age of 50 is considered normal, experts say. Being a country with large agricultural areas, Serbia saw no famine in the nineties, but people lived on what was most available – pork, bacon, potatoes.

“Healthcare standards deteriorated together with all other standards,” Djordjevic says. “In the decade of Milosevic, not a penny was spent on prevention of diseases. Only this year, the Ministry of Health is spending its first million dollars on a healthy life propaganda campaign.”

Experts want health authorities to do something to change this situation. The cost of treating cancer patients is 75 million dollars a year, they say.

“We are lagging behind everyone in Europe in the area of health,” Bekic says. “We are practically at the point where we were 20 years ago. We’ll need years of work if we want to see positive effects.”