Cancer survival in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Central America. Introduction

The dearth of reliable survival statistics from developing countries was very evident until the mid-1990s. This prompted the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) to undertake a project that facilitated hands-on-training and thereby transfer of knowledge and technology on cancer survival analysis to a majority of researchers from the participating population-based cancer registries, which culminated in the publication of the first volume of the IARC scientific publication on Cancer Survival in Developing Countries in 1998. The present study is the second in the series with wider geographical coverage and is based on data from 27 registries in 14 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Central America. The calendar period of registration of incident cases for the present study ranges between 1990 and 2001. Data on 564 606 cases of 1-56 cancer sites from different registries are reported. Data from eleven registries were utilized for eliciting survival trend and seventeen registries for reporting survival by clinical extent of disease. Besides chapters on every registry and general chapters on methodology, database and overview, the availability of online comparative statistics on cancer survival data by participating registries or cancer site in the form of tables or graphs is an added feature (available online at http://survcan.iarc.fr).