Extracts below from an editorial in The Lancet Child and Adolescent Health and a comment from me. Read online: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(26)00136-7/fulltext
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Global childhood cancer surveillance: too many left in the dark
The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health
May 2026 concludes a year of celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). For six decades, the agency has championed global collaboration in generating evidence for cancer control, including for children and adolescents. Yet the global cancer burden has grown in the IARC's lifetime, and stark disparities remain: children in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) bear the highest burden of paediatric cancer—more than 85% of global cases—and the lowest survival.
Ending this injustice begins with collecting high-quality data to identify health-care gaps, inform policy, and enact health-system change. Yet in LMIC settings, where they are needed most, such data are difficult to capture. As the IARC and partners look ahead to future decades, closing the childhood cancer surveillance gap is a top priority...
The paucity of data in LMICs is paralleled by myriad challenges to health-care access and delivery for children with cancer, including late presentation, delayed diagnosis, lack of specialist workforce, treatment abandonment, essential medicines shortages, and limited supportive care. These challenges point to under-resourced and fragmented health-care systems characterised by competing priorities, lack of strategic investments for infrastructure, training, and technology, and sometimes insufficient political will.
Ultimately, health data curating and health service delivery go hand-in-hand, and improving their quality and value to children with cancer is only possible if invested in simultaneously. As the number of childhood cancer diagnoses is expected to increase in the next decade owing to population growth and improvements in case diagnosis and reporting, bridging the childhood cancer surveillance gap with sustained political commitment, financial investment, international collaborations must start now...
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COMMENT (NPW): 'late presentation, delayed diagnosis, lack of specialist workforce, treatment abandonment, essential medicines shortages, and limited supportive care' - I invite CHIFA members to share any experience about the delivery of cancer care for children in your country.
A previous message on CHIFA noted that 'An estimated 40–50% of children with cancer in low-income settings do not receive a diagnosis, often because symptoms are not recognised or access to diagnostic services is patchy'. I would like to offer CHIFA as a platform for a sponsored Spotlight on this topic. Spotlights are a new service from HIFA and CHIFA that provide an affordable way for an organisation or individual to sponsor a thematic discussion: www.hifa.org/spotlights
Best wishes, Neil
CHIFA 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