India, July 9 -- One in five people will possibly be diagnosed with cancer in our lifetime. What determines whether that diagnosis is survivable, per the World Health Organization (WHO)'s new Global Status Report on Cancer released this week, is geography and income. Five-year survival exceeds 85% in high-income countries and falls below 30% in low-income ones. The clearest evidence of the divide comes from new WHO estimates for breast and childhood cancer survival. For breast cancer, five-year survival is 87% in wealthy nations against 42% in poor ones - a difference not of tumours but of systems.

This is not a knowledge problem. WHO all but admits it: The science exists, the plans exist; the money and the delivery mechanism do not. Nat...