Konstantinos Makris: Worrying rise in child cancer, urgent need to investigate the causes

Local cancerchildrenhealthTop News Konstantinos Makris: Worrying rise in child cancer, urgent need to investigate the causes Young Child Therapy Battling Cancer Relevant News Konstantinos Makris: Worrying rise in child cancer, urgent need to investigate the causes 9 August 2026 Total solar eclipse to sweep across parts of Europe on 12 August 9 August 2026 Woman, 22, critically injured in Larnaca district motorcycle crash 9 August 2026 Xenia Tourki 9 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber The rise in new childhood cancer cases in Cyprus over the past decade has sounded a loud alarm. While other European countries have not recorded a similar trend, data from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organisation (WHO), raise a critical question for the island: why are more and more children and teenagers up to the age of 19 developing cancer? Speaking to Phileleftheros, Konstantinos Makris, Professor of Environmental Health at the Exposome and Personalised Health Laboratory and Director of the Cyprus International Institute for Environmental and Public Health at the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT/TEPAK), said the rise in new cases is causing serious concern, though the reasons behind the upward trend remain unknown. As he explains, attention is focused on the child’s “exposome”: the sum of environmental factors, habits and exposures that shape a person’s life from the moment of conception. The air a child breathes, the water they drink, their diet, sedentary lifestyle, radiation and contact with chemical substances such as pesticides may interact and contribute to the development of cancer. Without sufficient, systematic data, however, the scientific community is still working in the dark. “Without this data, there is no meaningful way to design primary prevention for Cyprus’s child population, and we don’t know what the root cause is so that we can tackle it.” Immediate measures are therefore needed, and Konstantinos Makris insists on the creation of observatories to monitor children’s health and exposome, in order to identify the factors linked to the disease and design meaningful primary prevention. He warns that Cyprus has so far failed in this area and calls on the state to change course, investing not only in treatment but also in the search for the causes making children ill. In a recent article, you referred to worrying data on childhood cancer. Let’s talk about the IARC-WHO study you drew your information from. This isn’t the first time IARC-WHO has produced a study like this; it’s been carried out systematically in recent years. It maps all types of cancer and how they’re distributed worldwide, by country, by population, by age group, by gender, and whether there are trends over time. Based on this analysis, we have data on what’s happening in each country. For Cyprus, the Cancer Registry collects all the data on new cases and deaths and sends it to IARC-WHO. What we’ve observed in Cyprus in recent years is that the number of deaths where cancer is the main cause has stabilised, both in children and adults. We would, however, like to see a decrease, given that knowledge and new services have increased at both diagnostic and treatment level. On the other hand, the fact that deaths haven’t risen is positive, given that new cases have. Specifically in childhood cancer, though, we’re seeing an increase in new cases, and that’s particularly worrying. Does this increase concern specific areas, or Cyprus as a whole? Unfortunately, we can’t know that, because the data submitted to the World Health Organisation covers the whole territory of Cyprus. It’s possible that someone could reach that kind of conclusion if they requested the figures from the Ministry of Health. Do we know which forms of cancer appear to be most common? For childhood cancer, we’re talking about leukaemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and brain/central nervous system cancer. These are typically among the most common types of childhood cancer (ages 0-19). I’d stress, though, that over the past ten years, instead of the number of new cases stabilising, we’ve recorded an increase. What’s particularly concerning is that this upward trend isn’t seen to the same degree in other European countries. How do you explain the difference? This is a particularly concerning point. It’s an alarm bell we need to take very seriously. The increase has happened over the last ten years, so it’s relatively recent. It could be due to a combination of factors we can’t identify; at this stage, we’re working in the dark. These factors interact with each other and with the daily life of the child and their family, triggering and driving this abnormal growth of cancer cells, in other words, carcinogenesis. It could be a mix of some new factors combined with some old ones. What are the classic factors? And what could the new ones be? Classic factors include all types of radiation, obesity, poor diet, and certain chemicals such as pesticides. The new factors obviously have to do with the child’s environment, because genes can’t change in ten or twenty years in a way that would explain this. So we need to look for them in the child’s daily life. There’s a lot of speculation, but we need to move beyond speculation and work with data. And how can that be done? To move beyond speculation, we need to start looking for possible causes of carcinogenesis, and that has to be done in an epidemiologically and scientifically sound way. We need specific data to examine the child’s everyday environment, such as the water they drink, the air they breathe, the food they eat, and the kind of lifestyle they and their family lead. After all, the process of carcinogenesis in childhood may well begin as early as conception. Throughout the years from pregnancy to the age at which a child is unfortunately diagnosed with some form of cancer, it’s very important to monitor the lifestyle they follow, their daily routine, and the kinds of factors they’re exposed to, whether chemical, such as pesticides, physical, such as climate, or biological, such as certain microbes. We need to look closely at the child’s everyday life, something now known worldwide in scientific terms as the child’s “exposome”: all the choices and behaviours that shape a person’s life from the moment they’re conceived in their mother’s womb until their death. Is there a relationship between the exposome and the genome? The exposome is analogous to, and corresponds with, the genome. If you remember, back in 2000, when the genome was mapped, scientists said we were entering an era in which all chronic diseases would be cured. But almost thirty years on, we haven’t got there. Not only have we failed to reduce new cases, but we’re seeing them rise in some countries, such as Cyprus. Perhaps we need to change course and study primary prevention of childhood cancer more seriously. Childhood cancer is, of course, curable in many cases, but perhaps we need to place greater weight on prevention, and for that we need the support of the whole of Cypriot society so we can start systematically studying our children’s daily lives. That’s how prevention works. If we want to understand the root of the problem, rather than focusing solely on treatment protocols, which are very important but only come into play once something has already happened, if we want to find out why some children fall ill and others fortunately don’t, we need to investigate children’s environment and daily lives. We need more data What are the consequences of the lack of production and collection of relevant data, especially concerning cancer in Cyprus’s younger population? It’s precisely the lack of health and environmental data on children that prevents us from understanding the cause of the rise in cases. I’ll come back to this point and say that we need so-called observatories, which would collect data from very early in a person’s life, so that in a few years we’ll know which individuals developed cancer and which didn’t. That way, we’ll be able to compare the exposome of children who fell ill with that of children who didn’t. Without this data, there is no meaningful way to design primary prevention for Cyprus’s child population, and we don’t know what the root cause is so we can tackle it. So I’d say we’ve failed on the issue of primary prevention for children. It’s a failure, especially when we see new cases rising. That’s why we need to change course and take this issue very seriously. Because the way things are going now, I don’t believe we’re in a position to reduce or stabilise new cases in the coming years. So, more information would allow us to move forward in tackling it too. Exactly. That’s why, at this stage, I compare the exposome to a black box. There’s no other way for us to discover, out of the many potential factors implicated in carcinogenesis, what actually applies in Cyprus’s case, while of course maintaining confidentiality, protecting personal data and ensuring safety, with the sole aim of finding out exactly what is making our children ill. Educational programmes that advise citizens to exercise and watch their weight, for example, are good, but we also need children’s health observatories to collect data that decision-makers can then use. Diet, sedentary lifestyle, long hours in front of screens, chemicals, and all the factors that make up the exposome need to be looked at together and cumulatively, to better understand the chances a child has of developing cancer. We can’t approach this piecemeal, saying it’s the air’s fault, or something else’s fault. Cancer is a multifactorial disease, and that’s how we need to study it. The scientific tools of the human exposome now exist to make this possible. So this way, we would see a difference? Yes, by collecting data, the black box of the exposome will start to be illuminated, with information we can use not only for today’s children but for the children of the future too. Cyprus has a high level of education and a good standard of living. It’s a real shame that it doesn’t give the necessary importance to prevention for the sake of future generations. We need to stop thinking about development only in economic terms and start thinking about what makes a family smile and feel happy, what gives them quality of life and a satisfactory level of wellbeing. That means we start taking health issues, and social health issues, very seriously. As you can understand, these are new concepts and practices, and politicians need to grasp their importance, make the necessary investments, and, together with health professionals, begin putting them into practice. This won’t happen overnight. Do you see any efforts being made towards better data collection, or aren’t we even there yet? There’s an initiative in the works from the Health Monitoring Unit. It’s a bill currently being discussed by parliament and Cypriot society, and it’s a very good effort that will let us observe more systematically and collect health data for everyone. Once this initiative is enacted into law, we’ll have good records of various diseases as well as the health status of the healthy population. However, we also need these observatories for children’s exposome, so we can halt the rise in childhood cancer, as well as other factors driving carcinogenesis, such as childhood obesity. 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