What the New WHO Global Cancer Report Means for the Colorectal Cancer Community

This week, the World Health Organization and the International Agency for Research on Cancer released the Global Status Report on Cancer 2026: The Future We Choose Together, only the second report of its kind, following the first in 2020. It's a sobering document. Cancer now claims more than 26,000 lives a day, and without urgent action, annual cases are projected to rise from 20.6 million to nearly 35 million by 2050. That’s nearly 50,000 deaths a day from cancer.

Colorectal cancer is highlighted throughout the report, and the data reflects what many of us have been saying for years: without major health system changes, colorectal cancer is poised to become one of the leading causes of cancer death in country after country. Here's what the report shows, and what it means for the work still ahead of us.

A cancer that's growing almost everywhere

Colorectal cancer remains the third most common cancer worldwide, responsible for roughly 1.1 million new cases in men and 0.9 million in women each year, and it's the second or third leading cause of cancer death for both sexes. What's more striking is the trend line: of the 63 countries tracked in IARC's long-term incidence dataset, nearly all of them saw colorectal cancer rates rise across every adult age group between 1995 and 2021. And cases in adults under 50 keep climbing, and researchers still don't have a good answer for why. Unlike some other early-onset trends, this isn't just a side effect of more screening. It's the population our early-onset programs were built to reach, and this report tells us we were right to treat it as urgent.

The screening gap is the worst of any major cancer

Here's the number that should stop every policymaker in their tracks: of the 130 countries WHO and IARC surveyed, 78 have no organized colorectal cancer screening program at all. That's worse than breast cancer, worse than cervical cancer: colorectal screening has the lowest level of global implementation of any cancer type in the report. And even where programs exist, coverage swings from under 10% in early pilots to 60–70% in the most mature systems, meaning "we have a screening program" often means very little in practice.

It gets worse when you look at financing. Colorectal cancer screening was the least likely of all the interventions WHO surveyed to be included in national health benefit packages: only 44% of low-income countries cover it, compared to 89% of high-income countries. If a service isn't in the benefit package, it isn't reaching patients, no matter how good the guideline is.

Survival still depends far too much on geography

Five-year survival for colorectal cancer ranges from 39% in lower-middle-income countries to 63% in high-income countries, a wider income gap than the report found for breast or prostate cancer. This is the gap GCCA's core belief is built around: where you live should not determine your ability to prevent or survive colorectal cancer. Now we have the report's own numbers making that case for us. And we have proof it can change: in Thailand, expanding universal health coverage lifted colorectal cancer survival from 40% to 48% in just fifteen years.

Biomarker testing gaps aren't just a low-resource problem

This is exactly the gap our Know Your Biomarker campaign was built to close. The report cites a US study finding that only 40–51% of metastatic colorectal cancer patients, even in well-resourced community and academic practices, received guideline-recommended biomarker testing (KRAS/NRAS/BRAF/MSI). This is not only a low- and middle-income country problem. Patients everywhere are being under-tested, and that means some are being started on treatments that were never going to work for their tumor. Universal access to biomarker testing isn't a luxury; it's basic, guideline-concordant care, and even the study the report cites shows we still have work to do in the countries with the most resources.

Surgical outcomes reveal a gap in catching complications, not in surgical skill

A large multi-country surgical study cited in the report found that 30-day mortality after colorectal cancer surgery is roughly twice as high in lower-income countries as in high-income ones, even though complication rates during surgery were similar. The difference isn't the operation itself; it's what happens afterward, when a complication needs to be caught and managed. That's a systems and staffing issue, and it's fixable with the right investment.

What this means for the Global CRC community

WHO's report calls for integrating cancer care into universal health coverage, putting people with lived experience at the center of policy, and closing the diagnostics gap that WHO member states committed to closing back in 2021, through a World Health Assembly resolution (WHA74.8) on strengthening access to diagnostics. None of this is new to those of us in the CRC community: patient groups, screening advocates, and biomarker champions around the world have been pushing on exactly these fronts for years, often with limited resources and even less visibility. GCCA's CRC Health Equity Grants and Know Your Biomarker campaign are part of that same effort, built to close the screening and testing gaps this report just confirmed at a global scale, and they're only two examples of the work our members and partners are doing every day.

The report's title calls this "the future we choose together." For our community, that choice is specific: get screening funded and included in national health benefit packages, guarantee biomarker testing regardless of income, and invest in the health systems that catch complications before they become fatalities. We'll keep raising these numbers with policymakers in the months ahead, and I hope you'll raise them with us.

‍