Professor Ian Frazer—
New World: New opportunities, and new challenges, in health care
B-HERT sponsored former B-HERT Award Winner (1999) Professor Ian Frazer to speak at the New World New Opportunity Conference in Sydney organised by the Hargraves Institute in Sydney on the 10th March 2009.
In his address Professor Frazer referred to the 21st Century as the century of prevention of chronic disease, through application of knowledge about factors conveying increased risk to development of appropriate risk mitigation strategies. At least 30% of cancer can be prevented by a few simple strategies including tobacco control, weight control, moderation of alcohol consumption and avoidance of excess sunlight, while removing known carcinogens from the environment would prevent another 20%. Add in vaccines to prevent the 20% of cancer caused by infection, and cancer would not be the number one killer in the developed world it has become today, and would not pose the threat of becoming the number one killer in the developing world.
Personal knowledge of our genes, and how we vary one from another, has already made significant inroads into mapping those at risk of diabetes and arthritis, and over the next 50 years it is likely that the combination of rapid gene sequencing and large scale epidemiological studies across whole populations will demonstrate which of us are most prone to the common serious chronic diseases, including persistent viral infections, vascular degeneration, neurodegenerative disease, and chronic destructive inflammatory disease.
Professor Frazer is the Director of the Diamantina Institute of Cancer Immunology and Metabolic Medicine, a research institute of the University of Queensland at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane.
