A rationale for health promotion in cancer control

As the result of a long struggle to conceptualize cancer control and to implement control measures, the scientific community recently has been able to identify the essential factors that must be the foundation of a systematically approached national cancer control program. This accomplishment is welcomed given the refractory nature of the health-research, health-care system in our country to apply what is already known for the benefit of the public health. It took the United States a decade and a half to act on knowledge that smoking causes cancer and a decade and a half more to realize that its efforts to control smoking and tobacco use are still small and are not commensurate with available knowledge from biomedical and behavioral research. In this article, these factors are reviewed in the historical context in which cancer control has been evolving and addressed in the light of health promotion issues.