Richard Sullivan, Co-Director of the Centre for Conflict and Health Research, and Professor of Cancer and Global Health at King’s College London, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Real insights from the post-conflict recovery period for cancer systems are sparse, as our work has shown.
Liberia, Rwanda and Syria all reflect very different pre-conflict realities, and their respective trajectories have few similarities. What is similar about all three is the lack of a systematic analysis of capacity and capability in oncology. These critical failures mask a deeper problem. The lack of a basic framework for post-conflict recovery of complex cancer systems.
There is also very little to guide the hardening of cancer-specific services, e.g. radiotherapy. Studies to date have been mostly descriptive and unlinked to the critical task of context-specific preparedness and response planning. Systematically understanding ‘lessons learnt’ from different conflict ecosystems would significantly aid better forward planning.
For many countries, cancer control was already weak before hostilities. For these places, cancer services remain firmly within the emergency response system. Whilst this offers ample global lessons for the humanitarian system, only Ukraine serves as an archetype for high-income countries. The impact of the war in Ukraine on cancer control provides sobering insights into how modern, technically sophisticated conflicts impact cancer and health systems.
War produces systemic, long-term workforce losses and displacement. Wartime economies reshape health resource allocation, and complex NCDs are invariably triaged ‘down’. Thirdly, patient and care availability are subject to dramatic, kinetic forces – weapons, hybrid warfare (disinformation) – that reshape therapeutic geographies in ways that are difficult to predict and thus to plan for proactively.”
Title: Disinformation and Epidemics: Anticipating the Next Phase of Biowarfare
Authors: Rose Bernard, Gemma Bowsher, Richard Sullivan, Fawzia Gibson-Fall
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