| Summary: | "In February 2011 the Arctic health ministers signed the Nuuk Declaration. The declaration provides guidance for circumpolar countries and calls for a collaborative response to shared health concerns. It recognizes the importance of long term observation, monitoring and surveillance of health changes in Arctic populations and the value of circumpolar comparative studies. Cancer is an emerging health problem among circumpolar indigenous peoples and concerns have been repeatedly voiced by indigenous peoples’ organizations. Effective prevention and control measures require valid and reliable surveillance data to support planning and evaluation. This review will provide the needed baseline evidence. While circumpolar countries, , have well established national cancer registries, few have the capability to distinguish indigenous from non-indigenous people among cancer cases in their databases. A circumpolar review will bring together relevant stakeholders to assess the current state of knowledge, identify data gaps, and propose strategies to close these gaps and improve our understanding of cancer in indigenous populations. The proposed project is similar to a previous circumpolar review of cancer among Inuit in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland over the period from 1989-2003. That project, conducted during 2007-08, provided Inuit organizations alarming new evidence of the cancer threat and assisted their planning and lobbying for cancer control services. That project pre- dated the formation of the Arctic Human Health Expert Group (AHHEG) and was not endorsed by the Arctic Council. The current project was approved at its meeting in Umeå in June 2011 and is now submitted to the Arctic Council’s Sustainable Development Working Group (SDWG) as an AHHEG project." /./
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