As Western lifestyle habits extend into developing countries, so too, do the diseases which come with them.

In a paper from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France the findings indicate that along with a rise in living standards, cancer will be on the rise.

A 75 percent increase in cancer by 2030 is expected in the developing world.

The researchers said that rising living standards in less developed countries would probably lead to a decrease in the number of infection-related cancers. But it was also likely there would also be an increase in types of the disease usually seen in richer countries.
They predicted that middle-income countries such as China, India and Africa could see an increase of 78 percent in the number of cancer cases by 2030.
Cases in less developed regions were expected to see a 93 percent rise over the same period, said the paper published in the journal Lancet Oncology.
Those rises would more than offset signs of a decline in cervical, stomach and other kinds of cancer in wealthier nations, said the researchers.

The most common types of cancer in the world are lung cancer, female breast cancer, colorectal cancer, stomach cancer, prostate cancer, liver cancer and cervical cancer.

A few treatable infections lead to over 2 million cancers a year.

Human papillomavirus, hepatitis B, hepatitis C and the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori are the leading infections which can cause cancer as well as HIV.

Merck’s Gardasil vaccine is used to prevent the human papillomavirus ,which is responsible for cervical and some head and neck cancers, is available for both men and women.

The expectation is that eliminating the virus will help to end the cancers.

In terms of deaths, the study authors estimated that 1.5 million of the 7.5 million cancer deaths that occurred worldwide in 2008 – or about one in five – were related to infectious diseases.

How do researchers know if a cancer is caused by an infectious disease? Viruses such as HPV and Hepatitis B and C actually invade a person’s DNA and leave their signature in the genetic sequence. Helicobacter pylori does not, but the bacterium can be found in gastric tumors.