The Asian American Network for Cancer Awareness, Research and Training (AANCART) and the American Cancer Society (ACS) have launched a searchable online database of Asian language cancer materials. This effort is supported by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health. The Asian and Pacific Islander Cancer Education Materials Web tool (APICEM) is designed to help Asians and Pacific Islanders with limited English-speaking abilities gain access to information on how to reduce their risks of preventable malignancies, including cancers of the breast, cervix, colon, liver, lung and stomach.

"The National Cancer Institute is very proud of this historic database, which will improve the transfer of critical cancer information to Asians and Pacific Islanders. Advances such as this bring us closer to eliminating suffering and death due to cancer among Asians and Pacific Islanders," said Mark Clanton, M.D., deputy director of the NCI for Cancer Care Delivery Systems.

The new Web resource, located on the American Cancer Society web site at http://www.cancer.org/apicem, will be unveiled March 24, 2006, in Hawaii, at the annual meeting of AANCART. AANCART is headquartered at the University of California, Davis in Sacramento. "Asians and Pacific Islanders are dying, in too many cases, from a lack of basic information about cancer," said Moon S. Chen, Jr., Ph.D., principal investigator of AANCART and associate director of the UC Davis Cancer Center. "This new Web resource was developed in response to the need we heard from the community, and the NCI, for a single point of access for authoritative cancer education materials for lay audiences. Through this Web portal, people will be able to download cancer information materials that have been reviewed for scientific content and translated into more than 12 Asian and Pacific languages. This site provides one-stop access to an unprecedented volume of these materials."
The new database catalogues and provides links to print materials written in the following languages: Khmer, Chamorro, Chinese, Hawaiian, Hmong, Ilokano, Korean, Samoan, Tagalog, Tongan and Vietnamese, as well as English-language materials culturally tailored for Native Hawaiian populations. Additional languages and topics will be added as more materials become available.

"Until now, health care providers may have had to go to several different organizations to find appropriate materials for their patients," said Sally West Brooks, chair of the ACS national board of directors. "Some of the materials have been available on Web sites, including our own. Others are on sites that may be difficult to find or not easily searchable. This new site provides a single point of access for all of the materials, and will permit a health-care provider to search for patient information by language, type of cancer, cancer-related topic or organization. As we continue to invite organizations that meet our criteria to contribute materials, the site will become increasingly robust and powerful." All materials catalogued on the site have been screened by expert reviewers for medical accuracy, linguistic appropriateness and cultural relevance.

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