BEIJING, May 31 (Xinhuanet) -- Unhealthy foods, smoking and drinking ¡ª all connected to various cancers ¡ª will combine with larger populations and fewer deaths from infectious diseases to drive Asian cancer rates up 60 percent by 2020, some experts predict.

    But unlike in wealthy countries where advanced medical care is found, there will likely be no prevention or treatment for many living in poor countries.

    "What happened in the Western world in the '60s or '70s will happen here in the next 10 to 20 years as life expectancy gets longer and we get better control on more common causes of deaths," said Dr. Jatin P. Shah, a professor of surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who attended a cancer conference last month in Singapore.

    "The habit of alcohol consumption, smoking and dietary changes will increase the risk of Western world cancers to the Eastern world," Shah said.

    The effect is already startling, with the Asia-Pacific making up about half of the world's cancer deaths and logging 4.9 million new cases, or 45 percent, of the global toll in 2002.

    That number is expected to surge to 7.8 million by 2020 if nothing changes, according to Dr. Donald Max Parkin, a research fellow at the University of Oxford who is a leading authority on global cancer patterns and trends.

    A lack of vaccines that prevent cancer-causing viruses is another obstacle for Asia, which is home to about three-quarters of the world's liver cancers, caused largely by Hepatitis B infections.

    A vaccine guarding against the virus has been available since the early 1980s and is routinely given to children in Western countries, but it is still not reaching large regions of the Asia-Pacific.

    "The problem is so huge that it's very difficult for us to know where to start," said Dr. Franco Cavalli, president of the nonprofit International Union Against Cancer. "All the new cancer treatments are so expensive, that already in the affluent countries we are not able to pay for them. ... So imagine what that means for low-income countries where you have 20 U.S. dollars a year per person for health expenditures."

    (Agencies)