Indian American cancer specialist Siddhartha Mukherjee, whose very first book has become a runaway success, advocates a strong anti-smoking campaign and breast cancer screening to battle the growing incidence of the disease in India. Less than a month after publication, Mukherjee’s book, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, on the history of the disease, features among “The 10 Best Books of 2010” in the New York Times Book Reviews on Sunday, a rare feat for a work of non-fiction. “Cancer is growing dramatically in certain parts of South Asia,” New Delhi-born Mukherjee said on phone from New York where he practises, blaming increase in tobacco smoking as “clearly one culprit among young men and women”. “But there are other culprits too,” he says.
“As the population ages and other diseases are slowly eliminated, cancer begins to come about.” “Cancer rises in the double negative only when all the other killers have been killed. So I think that’s beginning to occur in some parts of South Asia.”
To those who wonder if it is relevant to a country like India as “cancer treatment can be so expensive and such a vast enterprise, his answer is “absolutely, at all levels.” “A strong prevention campaign against smoking is not all that expensive and is highly relevant to the future of our health in India,” said Dr Mukherjee, assistant clinical professor at the oncology department at Columbia University, New York. Similarly, screening for breast cancer in the appropriate age group and its treatment with hormonal therapy “and certainly treatment of childhood cancers which are often curable are highly relevant to a country like India,” Dr Mukherjee said. Dr Mukherjee, 40, who grew up in New Delhi “immersed in reading and books” at home and cchool, says he “came into oncology in a sort of reverse, in the sense that I first trained as a cellular biologist when I was in Oxford”. “So I really came from the cell into medicine. Many people first train in medicine, then eventually get fascinated by cells.”