In an international context the diversity of cancer types in different countries highlights the need for cancer control activities that fully consider available resources as well as cancer patterns, given that different cancers may be variably amenable to primary prevention, early detection, screening and treatment.

Despite the large cancer problem in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC), there remains a notable lack of high-quality population-based cancer registries in the Middle East, North and Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Central and South America.

In lower-resource settings hospital-based registries can be an important step towards the establishment of population-based cancer registries, but only the latter provide an unbiased description of the cancer patterns and trends in defined catchment populations.

Currently, the existence of cancer registration worldwide shows large disparities between high-income and low- and middle-income countries: the percentage of population covered by cancer registries in the reference publication Cancer Incidence in Five Continents, vol IX (2007), is 83% in North America and 32% in Europe, but only 6% in Central and South America, 4% in Asia and 1% in Africa. The need is pressing to expand the coverage of population-based cancer registries in order to obtain more complete and reliable data to guide cancer control interventions.