Message from the President
The year 2020 has been an incredibly challenging year for everyone and the cancer community is no exception. COVID-19 has caused widespread disruptions to service delivery and threatens to slow the great progress made in the fight against cancer in recent times.
We continued to work closely with our membership and further strengthened our collaboration with our strategic network of organisations – NCD Alliance, City Cancer Challenge Foundation, McCabe Centre for Law & Cancer, WHO, International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – as well as our partners in the private sector and global health leaders and academia from across the globe.
Prevention and screening programmes were put on hold in many parts of the world and some treatments considered elective, including surgery, were suspended or postponed. Services and cancer resources were diverted, and some countries experienced shortages of essential medicines. Many UICC member organisations reported considerable drops in funding.
The primary purpose of UICC, since its inception in 1933, has been to convene the leaders in cancer control – treatment centres, researchers, patient groups, organisations carrying out diagnostics, screening and prevention programmes – to better fight cancer together. We managed to carry out this mission even during the difficult pandemic year of 2020.
This was a time when UICC’s support for the cancer community was more important than ever and we were determined to respond to the crisis positively. We cancelled all face-to-face events globally, including the World Cancer Congress that was planned to be held in Oman in October, and developed a suite of new services, such as the Virtual Dialogues, to support our 1,207 members and help them manage their way through the new challenges that arose as a result of the pandemic.
I would like to say thank you to HRH Princess Dina Mired, my predecessor as President of UICC, who led the Board of Directors until the General Assembly in October when I took on the role. The decisions taken by the Board and the management team during such a challenging year proved to be the right ones.
Determined to ensure that our advocacy messages and those of the cancer community were heard around the world, UICC continued to lead the cancer community with global initiatives. We started raising the profile of anti-microbial resistance to see that more effective antibiotics are developed and made available to those who need them; we worked with the World Health Organization (WHO) on the Global Strategy to eliminate cervical cancer; we launched a new five-year Breast Cancer Programme; and we pursued a stronger role in addressing the growing challenges created by the growing consumption of e-cigarettes around the world.
2020 UICC Annual Report
I am very honoured and proud to be the President of such an impactful organisation and would like to thank all staff, UICC members, partners and the Board of Directors for their support and unwavering commitment to improve cancer control globally.
Professor Anil D’Cruz President Union for International Cancer Control
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