A Consultant Oral Pathologist, Prof. Jos Hille, has decried the rising incidences of tongue and pharynx cancer in younger people.
Hille, who is also the Chief Head, Open Health Systems Laboratory (OHSL) in South Africa, said in Lagos that it was due to their early exposure to tobacco and alcohol.
He spoke at the opening ceremony of a three-day 1st International Association of Oral Pathology and Nigeria Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology/Medicine Specialist Annual Scientific Conference 2015.
Hille said that “Majority of oral cancers are due to carcinogens associated with exposure to tobacco smoking and alcohol.
“Human papilloma virus infection is most probably the main responsible agent for those oral cancers that are not caused by tobacco and alcohol.”
According to him, low and middle income countries account for 80 per cent of the worldwide cancer burden, but received only five per cent of the global financial resources.
He said that 50 percent of all symptomatic oral cancers had already spread to the regional neck lymph nodes and drastically reduced the survival rates.
The expert said that the major challenge of early diagnosis of oral cancer was the inability to develop “a fail-safe screening test,”
He said screening by clinical examination alone had resulted in poor detection rates, adding that it was already changing, stressing that 10 percent of all dental patients have some type of oral lesions.
In his remarks, Prof. Newell Johnson, a dental researcher from South Africa, said that the prevalence and incidence of untreated caries across the globe had not decreased for decades.
Johnson said that “With population growth, the burden is rising,” stressing that oral cancer incidence and mortality rate were rising in many countries.
“In the past several decades, attitudes to both prevention and management of dental diseases have been dominated by plaque control procedures, regarding all plaques as potentially pathogenic.
“Dental plaque represents just one of the resident microbial floras to be found on all external and internal body surfaces,” Johnson said.
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