Rising tobacco use and poverty will fuel cancer across the developing world, more than doubling the number of new cases to 27 million by 2050, experts predicted.
Cancer is already the No. 2 cause of death globally, after heart disease and ahead of AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis and other causes. And as people live longer and adopt bad habits such as smoking, cancer cases will rise, said Dr. Nancy Davidson of John Hopkins University in Baltimore, Reuters reported.
“It accounts for 10 percent of deaths,“ said Davidson, who is president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
She cited last week’s report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer that 7.6 million people will die of cancer this year, 5 million of them in developing countries.
The statistics contradict a perception that cancer is a disease of rich nations. Cancer deaths have fallen in the United States, dropping by more than 2 percent between 2002 and 2004.
“There will be 12 million new cancer cases diagnosed worldwide in 2007. By 2050, this number will more than double to 27 million, even if the rates don’t change,“ Dr. Lynn Ries of the US National Cancer Institute said in a telephone briefing.
Of these, 5.4 million cases will be in economically developed countries and 6.7 million in developing countries, Ries said.
Cancer is caused by a mix of factors, including genes, diet, lack of exercise and, rarely, chemical exposure. But the No. 1 cause is smoking.
And more people are using tobacco, said the National Cancer Institute’s Deirdre Lawrence.
“According to World Health Organization current estimates, the annual number of tobacco-related deaths worldwide is projected to rise from 4.9 million in 2000 to more than 10 million by 2020, unless effective interventions take hold,“ Lawrence told the briefing.
She said 70 percent of the deaths would be in the developing world.
In 1970, 3.26 million cigarettes were smoked globally. In 2000, it was 5.7 million.
The problem is notably clear in China, said Dr. Tony Mok of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“China produced about 39 percent of the world’s tobacco production,“ Mok told the briefing.
About 6 percent of this was exported, meaning the rest was consumed in China.

Nearly 95 percent of the e-mail sent in 2007 has been “spam,“ junk advertising loathed by its recipients, according to a report by a US web security firm.
The amount of junk e-mail has skyrocketed despite a 2004 US CAN-SPAM Act that placed restrictions on sending unwanted messages and sanctioned penalties for “spammers,“ according to California-based Barracuda Networks Inc.
Junk messages made up an estimated 70 percent of e-mail the year the act was passed, the Barracuda report indicates, said AFP.
“The spam war is a continuous battle between spammers and security vendors,“ said Barracuda chief executive, Dean Drako.
“Security vendors now require 24-by-7 defense operations to continuously monitor the Internet for new spam trends and distribute new defensive solutions immediately.“
Barracuda said it based its findings on analysis of more than a billion e-mail messages received daily by its approximately 50,000 customers worldwide.
Spammers cunningly hide their identities by routing e-mails through other people’s websites, blogs or computers, according to Barracuda.
Also according to AP, more Americans are googling themselves--and many are checking out their friends and co-workers.
In a report, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said 47 percent of US adult Internet users have looked for information about themselves through Google or another search engine.
That is more than twice the 22 percent of users who did in 2002, but Pew senior research specialist Mary Madden was surprised the growth was not higher.
“Yes it’s doubled, but it’s still the case that there’s a big chunk of Internet users who have never done this simple act of plugging their name with search engines,“ she said.
“Certainly awareness has increased, but I don’t know it’s necessarily kept pace with the amount of content we post about ourselves or what others post about us.“
About 60 percent of Internet users said they are not worried about the extent of information about themselves online, despite increasing concern over how that data can be used.
Americans under 50 and those with more education and income were more likely to self-Google--in some cases because their jobs demand a certain online persona.
Meanwhile, Pew found that 53 percent of adult Internet users admit to looking up information about someone else, celebrities excluded.

There are more than one million immigrants living in Greece, almost half of them are there legally, the Greek interior ministry said after an exhaustive immigration study.
Albanians make up 63 percent of the some 480,000 legal immigrants, the ministry said, adding that the next largest contingent was 27,000 Bulgarians then just over 19,000 Ukrainians, AFP reported.
Some 12,990 Georgians, 12,126 Pakistanis, 10,704 Russians and 10,356 Egyptians rounded out the list, it said.
The interior ministry said that as European markets gradually open to Bulgarians and Romanians, who joined the European Union in 2007, the number of Bulgarian and Romanian immigrants should drop.
It also said it was expecting a possible increase in Asian and Sub-Saharan immigrants.
The majority, over 56 percent, of the immigrants counted were young, between 19 and 40 and are children of the second generation, the ministry said.
Around five percent of legal immigrants own their own house and earn 1,550 euros ($2,230) per month on average, some 28 percent less than the average Greek household.
More than 30 percent of legal immigrants work in construction, while 20.5 percent are cleaning ladies, 12.8 percent are employed in manufacturing and 11.76 percent work in trade.

Eleven Asian nations facing the biggest threat from tuberculosis risk being saddled with a whopping trillion dollar economic burden over the next 10 years if they do not beef up their anti-TB strategy, a landmark study shows.
Led by China and India, the countries are already implementing a prevention and treatment strategy, popularly known as DOTS introduced by the World Health Organization (WHO) in the 1990s, reported AFP.
But the DOTS (the directly observed therapy) strategy was not sufficient to reduce the incidence of the disease, particularly in HIV-infected people and due to drug resistance, and had to be restructured.
A World Bank study released two weeks ago for the first time captured the economic benefits of extending the revamped DOTS strategy as proposed in the organization’s Global Plan to Stop TB covering the 2006-2015 period, reported channelnewsasia.com.
The research covered 22 “high-burden“ tuberculosis-endemic countries, including China, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Vietnam.
“These Asian nations have to grapple with a $1.17 trillion economic cost over a 10 year period if TB prevention and control are sustained at current levels of treatment,“ Ramanan Laxminarayan, an economist who led the study said.
“But if they embrace WHO’s global plan they could collectively save about $10 billion each year or $100 billion during the 10 year period,“ he said. “However, the costs of the global plan may be greater than these benefits in some countries.“
TB is the leading infectious killer of adults in Asia. The worst affected nations are China, India and Indonesia.
The economic impact of TB deaths and the benefits of TB control among the 22 high-burden countries are greatest in China and India, where the combination of growing incomes and a relatively high number of TB deaths translates into a significant economic effect, the study showed.
“The burden of TB in Asia while not as large as in Africa is a serious threat to public health,“ said Laxminarayan, who works with Resources for the Future, a Washington-based nonprofit research group.

Winter's first snowfall in Thursday created a traffic nightmare in Tehran.

There will be only two workers for every retiree between 2030 and 2050 in China.

China’s rapidly aging population could wipe out the country’s low-cost labor advantage within the next few decades and stifle economic growth, state media said.
The China Daily, quoting a report by the China National Committee on Aging, said that sometime between 2030 and 2050, there will be only two workers for every retiree--down from the current ratio of six workers to one retiree.
While China’s population is growing, the number of elderly is increasing at a quicker pace, reported Xinhua.
According to the report, China had 149 million people over the age of 60 last year.
That is expected to grow to 248 million in 2020 and 437 million in 2050. China now has a population of 1.3 billion.
“With fewer people of working age and more pressure on supporting the elderly, the economy will suffer if productivity sees no major progress,“ the aging committee’s deputy director, Yan Qingchun, was quoted as saying.
Economic reforms over the past three decades have turned China into the world’s factory floor on the back of cheap labor costs. But pressure from the reforms has also caused the communist welfare system to disintegrate, with layoffs from state-owned enterprises and a lack of social safety nets.
Yan was quoted as saying that China “might encounter the heaviest burden, especially after 2030“ when there could be an end to economic growth fueled by the growing number of people of working age.

Guatemala, Brazil and Indonesia have the greatest share of deeply religious people among 21 countries polled for a major study on faith by a German think tank released.
The Religion Monitor study for the Bertelsmann Foundation said Russia, Thailand and France had the smallest percentage of people who said religious belief was key to their lives, wrote AFP.
“Highly religious people are those for whom religious ideas play a decisive role in their personality,“ he said.
“They often see experiences and behavior in a genuinely religious light.“
The study was based on interviews with more than 21,000 people in 21 countries in which respondents ranked various aspects of their religious beliefs on numbered scales.
Nigeria, Brazil, India and Morocco had the highest overall ranking with more than 96 percent of their populations describing themselves as religious.
In Europe, the Swiss, Italians and Poles had the highest number of respondents professing religious faith, while France and Britain ranked lowest on the list.
Americans were found to be far more religious than their European counterparts with 89 percent considering themselves religious and among that 62 percent said they were deeply religious.

Four out of 10 adult Indians are illiterate despite government efforts to extend primary education, putting India below Brazil, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Thailand in a report.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should do more to ensure education for all in a country of over one billion people, said the Global Campaign for Education Report released by a network of voluntary groups, teachers’ unions and aid groups like Oxfam, AFP reported.
Singh was ranked 61st among 178 country heads and bagged 50 points out of 100 for his efforts to ensure education for all, Oxfam said in a statement.
The report noted that many developing countries--including Brazil, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, Sri Lanka and Thailand--had achieved a breakthrough in extending coverage of basic education in the past 18 years, ranking above India.
“Access to primary education has improved considerably in India, but drop out rates remain very high,“ said the statement.
It added, “While adult literacy rates have improved, nearly 40 percent of India’s adult population remains illiterate.
In particular, Singh needed to focus attention on improving the levels of education among girls, the statement said.