title: Cancer survival in a southern African urban population.
abstract: This paper provides the first comprehensive population based cancer survival estimates from the African continent. Five-year absolute and relative survival estimates are presented for black and white Zimbabwean patients diagnosed with cancer in Harare, Zimbabwe between the years 1993 and 1997. The survival of black Zimbabwean cancer patients are among the lowest ever reported from population based cancer registries. For most cancer sites, white Zimbabwean patients have much higher survival than black Zimbabweans, except for lung and colorectal cancer, for which the estimates are similarly poor. Race specific comparisons to cancer patients in the United States show that Zimbabwean patients have much lower survival than American cancer patients and that the gap between black Zimbabwean patients and black American patients is broader than between white Zimbabwean and white American patients. Access to and the ability to pay for medical care may be a very important barrier to better survival for the majority of black Zimbabwean patients and the most important cause for the very low cancer survival in this population.
authors.affiliation: German Centre for Research on Ageing, Heidelberg, Germany. gondos@dzfa.uni-heidelberg.de
authors.forename: Adam
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Gondos
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Chokunonga
authors.forename: Hermann
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Brenner
authors.forename: Donald Maxwell
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Parkin
authors.forename: Risto
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sankila
authors.forename: Margaret Z
authors.initials: MZ
authors.lastname: Borok
authors.forename: Z Michael
authors.initials: ZM
authors.lastname: Chirenje
authors.forename: Anna M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Nyakabau
authors.forename: Mary Travis
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Bassett
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001741:Black or African American; D000368:Aged; D044383:Black People; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006297:Health Services Accessibility; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000401:mortality*; D011379:Prognosis; D012042:Registries / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D016019:Survival Analysis; D014505:Urban Population; D044465:White People; D015030:Zimbabwe / Q000453:epidemiology