Dear HIFA colleagues,
I’m forwarding an interesting HIFA group email sent on 10 Nov. 2025, which is relevant to our current thematic discussion, particularly Q3: What inaccurate, misleading, or confusing information about cervical cancer have you encountered in your setting?
This could be added to the report.
Best wishes
Dr. Meena Nathan Cherian, MBBS, MD (Anaesthesia)
(Former WHO Lead Emergency and Essential Surgical Care Program, Geneva, Switzerland).
Director, Global Health New Challenges: Geneva Foundation for Medical Education & Research, Switzerland. www.gfmer.ch/surgery/cancer.htm (NSA-WHO)
Senior Advisor Global Action International Society of Geriatric Oncology Permanent Committees - SIOG
Senior Advisor, International College of Surgeons-Global Affairs. https://icsglobal.org/ (NSA-WHO)
Adjunct Prof.The Chinese University of Hong Kong,Shenzhen,China. https://med.cuhk.edu.cn/en/teacher/371
WHO-HIFA Essential Health Services; mHEALTH-INNOVATE. www.hifa.org (NSA-WHO).
Geneva, Switzerland. +41 763837253(m); cherianm15@gmail.com
HIFA profile: Dr Meena Nathan Cherian was a professor of anaesthesiology from Christian Medical College Hospital, Vellore, India. She trained, worked, and taught in several countries, USA (Johns Hopkins Hospital), Southeast Asia and Africa. She worked at the World Health Organization Headquarters, Geneva, Switzerland, as the Emergency and Essential Surgical Care Program Lead where she created the ‘surgical care’ program resulting in the first World Health Assembly Resolution on ‘Emergency and Essential Surgical Care and Anaesthesia in the context of Universal Health Coverage’. Currently she works as the Director, Global Health New Challenges program, Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research, Geneva, Switzerland; Adjunct Prof. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China; Senior Advisor, Global Action, International Society of Geriatric Oncology, Switzerland; Member of the WHO-HIFA Working Group on Essential Health Services and COVID-19; and HIFA mHEALTH-INNOVATE Working Group. She is a member of the HIFA Steering Group. https://www.hifa.org/support/members/meena and Spotlight working group on Patient Safety and NCDs. cherianm15 AT gmail.com
Subject [hifa] Medscape: The Cancer Misinformation Train: When Influencers Co-Opt Care
Extracts below. Full text: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/cancer-misinformation-train-when-in...
The woman sitting across from Kathy Miller, MD, had arrived too late. Not late for her appointment — late for the kind of treatment that might have saved her life.
Months earlier, when her cancer was still confined, still beatable, she had chosen high dose vitamin C along with ivermectin and mebendazole — two drugs commonly used to treat parasites — after discovering tips from people on social media who promised that Big Pharma was hiding the real cures.
Miller, a breast oncologist at Indiana University Health, Indianapolis, now faced the delicate task of explaining how far the disease had progressed without saying what hung in the air between them: You could have been cured...
A 2021 study, which assessed 200 of the most popular social media articles on Facebook and other sites, found that about one third contained misinformation and more than 30% contained harmful information. A more recent analysis reported even higher rates of cancer misinformation online, revealing that 81% of cancer cures promoted on TikTok were not evidence-based...
A 2018 analysis found that, among patients with curable cancers, use of alternative medicine instead of conventional cancer therapies was independently associated with 2.5-fold greater risk for dying. Among those with breast and colorectal cancers, the risk for dying was even higher — 5.7-fold for breast cancer and about 4.5-fold for colorectal cancer... ==
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org