By Amanda Weber -

When Artist in Residence Joanne Silberner attended a meeting on cancer in developing countries last fall, she didn’t anticipate that it would ignite her journalistic interests. After learning more about the problem and current treatments taking place around the world, she applied and was awarded by the Pulitzer Center On Crisis Reporting a $12,000 grant to report on how the disease is affecting people in Uganda, India and Haiti.

At the meetings she attended, Silberner learned that cancer kills more people in developing countries than the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), tuberculosis (TB) and malaria combined. Though it may not be one of the first diseases that come to mind when thinking about sickness in the developing world, it should be. Silberner hopes that her reporting will shed more light and increase awareness on what the Pulitzer Center considers a crisis.

“A lot of newspapers don’t have foreign bureaus anymore, so a lot of international stories aren’t being told,” she said. “I just sort of thought this was something people should know about. I didn’t, and I know a lot about global health, but I knew nothing.”

Flying out Feb. 17, Silberner will begin her three-week journey in Uganda, then head to India and, later, Haiti. She’ll spend one week in each location, meeting and talking with cancer patients and survivors, oncologists, and pain and cervical cancer specialists.

“Originally I wanted to find out whether it made any sense to focus on such an expensive and difficult-to-treat disease. But actually, in the reporting, I think I’ve come around to think that the answer is ‘Yes.’ I want the stories to make it clear that this is a serious threat to health in the developing countries and it’s worth paying attention to,” Silberner said.

On the first leg of her trip, Silberner plans to visit the Uganda Cancer Institute in Kampala. Ground was broken in October 2011 for an integrated cancer training and treatment facility, a collaboration of UCI and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. “The Hutch & the UW together have trained about nine oncologists,” she said. “This is a country that in 2008 had one cancer specialist in the whole country.  I’m going to be looking at patients and doctors, and new techniques that make it possible.”

In Haiti, she will reporting her findings on Zanmi Lasante (“Partners In Health” in Haitian Kreyol), a unique medical care unit providing cancer care in a primary care environment. “It would be like getting chemo care in your neighborhood health clinic. I’m very interested to see if they can do it because cancer care, a lot of it, is difficult to do.  It’ll be interesting to see what kind of hurdles they’ve gotten over.”

While she’s away, readers can keep up with Silberner via her blog for the Common Language Project. Every few days she’ll be writing about her personal experiences during her travels. “The blogging is about the process of reporting; not so much what I find out, but what’s it’s like to find this stuff out,” she said. Her stories on cancer in the developing world will be aired on KUOW and Public Radio International’s (PRI) The World at the start of summer.