Challenges to effective cancer control in China, India, and Russia

Cancer is one of the major non-communicable diseases posing a threat to world health. Unfortunately, improvements in socioeconomic conditions are usually associated with increased cancer incidence. In this Commission, we focus on China, India, and Russia, which share rapidly rising cancer incidence and have cancer mortality rates that are nearly twice as high as in the UK or the USA, vast geographies, growing economies, ageing populations, increasingly westernised lifestyles, relatively disenfranchised subpopulations, serious contamination of the environment, and uncontrolled cancer-causing communicable infections. We describe the overall state of health and cancer control in each country and additional specific issues for consideration: for China, access to care, contamination of the environment, and cancer fatalism and traditional medicine; for India, affordability of care, provision of adequate health personnel, and sociocultural barriers to cancer control; and for Russia, monitoring of the burden of cancer, societal attitudes towards cancer prevention, effects of inequitable treatment and access to medicine, and a need for improved international engagement.

Biomedical journals and databases in Russia and Russian language in the former Soviet Union and beyond

In the 20^th century, Russian biomedical science experienced a decline from the blossom of the early years to a drastic state. Through the first decades of the USSR, it was transformed to suit the ideological requirements of a totalitarian state and biased directives of communist leaders. Later, depressing economic conditions and isolation from the international research community further impeded its development. Contemporary Russia has inherited a system of medical education quite different from the west as well as counterproductive regulations for the allocation of research funding. The methodology of medical and epidemiological research in Russia is largely outdated. Epidemiology continues to focus on infectious disease and results of the best studies tend to be published in international periodicals. MEDLINE continues to be the best database to search for Russian biomedical publications, despite only a small proportion being indexed. The database of the Moscow Central Medical Library is the largest national database of medical periodicals, but does not provide abstracts and full subject heading codes, and it does not cover even the entire collection of the Library. New databases and catalogs (e.g. Panteleimon) that have appeared recently are incomplete and do not enable effective searching.