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Thursday, February 19, 2009

World Cancer Day - New Thinking Needed for Cancer Crisis

World Cancer Day, marked each year on February 4, aims to raise awareness of the global cancer burden and inspire greater effort to fight the disease. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) hosted a special World Cancer Day event at the Vienna International Centre (VIC), Vienna, Austria.

Latest figures from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) show that by 2010 cancer will have overtaken cardiovascular disease to become the world´s number one killer. According to IARC´s World Cancer Report for 2008, there were more than 12 million new cancer cases worldwide last year alone. Because people in developing countries are now living longer and adopting western lifestyles, including more tobacco use and high-fat diets, cancer numbers are increasing dramatically and many cancer patients have little or no access to proper diagnosis and treatment.

Incidence is rising so rapidly that by 2030 there could be as many as 27 million people with cancer and 17 million cancer deaths annually, more than 70% of them in the developing world. The IAEA is urging a vigorous, collaborative approach such as Programme of Action for Cancer Therapy (PACT), towards fighting the disease in poorer countries that are least able to cope with the worsening cancer crisis.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

CO2 Threats to World´s Oceans Rising, Scientists Warn

In Monaco, scientists at the IAEA Marine Environment Laboratories (IAEA-MEL) have joined more than 150 experts from 26 countries calling for urgent actions to halt rising levels of acidity in the world´s oceans. Marine scientists warn that coral reefs are in danger from climate changes and ocean acidification. Most ocean regions could become inhospitable to coral reefs by 2050 if atmospheric CO2 levels continue to increase.

The leading scientists joined to back the Monaco Declaration on Ocean Acidification, directed at government leaders worldwide. The Declaration emphasizes that levels of acidity in oceans are accelerating and that the negative socio-economic impacts can only be limited by cutting back on the amounts of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere.

The ocean absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of more than 20 million tons per day, thus removing one-fourth of the anthropogenic CO2 emitted to the atmosphere each year and reducing the climate-change impacts of this greenhouse gas. However, when CO2 dissolves in seawater, it forms carbonic acid. As this "ocean acidification" continues, it decreases both ocean pH and the concentration of carbonate ion, the basic building block of the shells and skeletons of many marine organisms. Surface ocean pH has already dropped by 0.1 units since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

It could lead to substantial changes in commercial fish stocks, threatening food security for millions of people as well as the multi-billion dollar fishing industry. The issue looks graver in comparison to the climate change.