President Joe Biden's cancer panel says COVID-19 has allowed cancer screening to falsely become an elective option and is urging better communication about its necessity.
This is the finding of the panel’s new report, which sounds alarm bells about the “urgent and immediate action [that] must be taken” to boost cancer screening.
The report found too many Americans—particularly those in communities of color and socially/economically disadvantaged populations—are presenting “with more advanced disease at the time of diagnosis, enduring aggressive treatment” or dying from cancers that could have been detected at earlier, more treatable stages.
The panel is made up of three members appointed by the Biden administration and includes John Williams, M.D., chair and medical director of the Breast Cancer School for Patients; Edith Mitchell, M.D., a clinical professor of medicine and medical oncology and director of the Center to Eliminate Health Disparities at Sidney Kimmel Cancer Care Center at Thomas Jefferson University; and Robert Ingram, general partner at Hatteras Venture Partners.
Their report noted that at one point during the COVID-19 era, the U.S. experienced a 90% reduction of cancer screenings. “While screening rates were not high enough prior to 2020, during the pandemic, cancer screenings such as mammograms, colonoscopies, HPV and PAP tests, and lung cancer screenings were postponed or canceled, in many cases labeled as ‘elective,’” said Williams.
“We must correct the misperception that cancer screening is ‘elective.’ We need to learn from the time of disruption and seize this time of opportunity because the long-term impact of missed or delayed screenings is that more people will die from cancer.”
The report did not single out a barrier responsible for gaps in cancer screening uptake, finding that some barriers are specific for a certain cancer type while “many reach across all types of cancer screening.”
These include lack of awareness or understanding, lack of provider recommendation, logistical challenges, fear and stigma, and concerns about cost.
One of the key recommendations from the report is to “improve and align communication through communications campaigns.”
Pharma, which creates and sells many of the cancer screening tools on the market, is all too aware of the problem, and has been pushing hard to get patients back in for regular cancer screening. (Fewer people going for screenings means fewer people using their cancer drugs.)
Stars like Patti Labelle, Jamie Foxx and rapper Chuck D lent their voices to pharma-backed PSAs last year to keep cancer screenings top of mind while the world was focused on that other big “C” disease.
AstraZeneca’s “New Normal Same Cancer” campaign warned that cancer wouldn’t wait for things to get back to normal.
And Roche's Genentech teamed with the American Cancer Society on a “Return to Screening'' initiative, aimed, like the others, at reversing the steep drop in routine cancer checkups in the pandemic’s early days.
New data out from Epic Research, released last week, show up the same issue and found a staggering 94% drop in breast and cervical cancer screenings and an 86% drop in colon cancer screening in 2020, when compared to previous years leading up to the pandemic.