🇲🇽 Cancer in Mexico

INEGI's release of 30 January 2026, drawing on its Estadísticas de Defunciones Registradas for 2024, counts 819,672 registered deaths, of which 95,108 (11.6%) were due to malignant tumours: 52.5% women and 47.5% men. The crude rate was 73.1 per 100,000 (74.9 in women and 71.2 in men), up from 65.0 in 2015, and women's rate has stayed above men's since 2021. By state, the age-standardised rate ran from 90.1 in Chihuahua, 88.8 in Baja California Sur and 86.9 in Baja California to 50.7 in Guerrero, 63.6 in Durango and 63.9 in Tlaxcala. Leukaemia had the highest cancer death rate under 20 (1.9 per 100,000 girls, 2.4 per 100,000 boys); at 20 to 29 it was leukaemia in women (2.1) and testicular cancer in men (3.4). From 30, breast cancer had the highest rate in women (15.3 at 30 to 59, 51.9 at 60 and over, with cervical cancer second at 30 to 59 at 9.9); in men it was colon cancer at 30 to 59 (4.8) and prostate cancer from 60 (97.9). The same release counts 57,019 discharges for malignant tumours from private hospitals in 2024, 18.9% of them in Mexico City.

Article 161 Bis of the Ley General de Salud, added by a reform published on 22 June 2017, says the Registro Nacional de Cáncer will be population-based, fed by the national basic health information system, and hold patient, tumour, treatment, follow-up and survival data, organised by northern, central and southern regions; the reform's transitional articles gave the ministry sixty days after it took effect to issue the registry's regulation. A 2021 amendment added a section for children under the childhood cancer law. The Instituto Nacional de Cancerología coordinated the network: registries in Acapulco, Baja California Sur, Campeche, Guadalajara, Hermosillo, León, Monterrey, Tijuana and Toluca recorded 13,517 new cancers from 2017 to 2020, from 481 public and private sources but without IMSS institutions, which cover around 55% of the population, before budget restrictions suspended it in 2020; its authors call the results partial. A registry in Mérida, run at an IMSS institution since 2016, covers 908,536 people. On 22 September 2025 the Secretario de Salud presented the registry's paediatric module; the estimate of new children's cancers quoted in the press report was 3,000 to 5,000 a year.

Article 77 bis 1 of the Ley General de Salud, in the text reformed in 2019 and 2023, says that everyone in the country without social security has the right to receive public health services, medicines and associated supplies free of charge at the moment they need them, without discrimination, guaranteed by the states and concurrently by the federation through the Sistema de Salud para el Bienestar, including outpatient and hospital care and the medicines of the Compendio Nacional de Insumos para la Salud. The decree of 31 August 2022, amended on 15 August 2025, created IMSS-Bienestar to give people without social security comprehensive free medical and hospital care with medicines, in the states that sign agreements transferring their services to it. The social security institutes are separate systems: article 12 of the Ley del Seguro Social makes anyone in paid, subordinate work subject to IMSS's compulsory scheme, and the ISSSTE law applies to workers of the federal government's departments and agencies. Which states have transferred their services, and what share of cancer patients each system treats, are not stated here.

Article 77 bis 29 of the Ley General de Salud makes the Fondo de Salud para el Bienestar a public trust in a development bank, with IMSS-Bienestar as settlor, whose resources go to three purposes: the care of diseases that involve high-cost treatments and associated medicines; infrastructure and equipment, preferably in the most marginalised states; and complementing the supply of medicines and access to clinical tests for people without social security. High cost means treatments and medicines defined by the Consejo de Salubridad General with explicit clinical and epidemiological criteria, selected for safety, efficacy, payment, effectiveness, professional ethics and social acceptability, because of their complexity or specialisation and how often they occur. The law's chapter on the fund was renamed by the reform of 29 November 2019, and the rules still refer to commitments made before 18 July 2023 under the subaccount for diseases causing catastrophic expenditure. The operating rules approved on 11 August 2023 leave new interventions, or wider criteria for existing ones, to the fund's technical committee, which must review the financial data at least every two years. The list of cancers and treatments the fund currently pays for could not be found in a primary source and is named under gaps.

The Ley General para la Detección Oportuna del Cáncer en la Infancia y la Adolescencia, published in the Diario Oficial on 7 January 2021, covers people under 18 with a suspicion of cancer while it has not been ruled out, those with a confirmed diagnosis, and people over 18 still in treatment that began before they turned 18. Article 7 lists their rights, including integrated care from prevention to palliative care, health service benefits from confirmation of diagnosis to discharge even if the patient passes 18 during treatment, psychosocial support, special academic support so that school absences do not significantly affect their studies, and authorisation of all procedures, comprehensively and promptly, from presumption of cancer until the diagnosis is ruled out. Article 21 requires a provider at any level of care to refer the patient to the nearest accredited medical unit within no more than seven working days of presuming cancer. Article 28 provides for mobile units able to give outpatient cancer treatment in regions without an accredited unit close enough, and article 29 creates the children's section of the national cancer registry.

Article 28 of the Ley General de Salud says the Consejo de Salubridad General draws up the Compendio, to which the public institutions of the national health system must keep, and article 29 that each institution draws its own list of essential medicines from it. The commission's rules, published in the Diario Oficial on 10 April 2024, require a request for inclusion to carry an economic evaluation prepared under the council's guide: a systematic review of the evidence against medicines already in the Compendio for the same indication, or against the standard of care in national or international clinical guidelines; a cost-minimisation, cost-effectiveness, cost-utility or cost-benefit analysis; a budget-impact analysis; and the model files so it can be reproduced. The technical secretariat has fifteen working days to check the file, and the commission sixty working days from acceptance to decide, extendable while extra information is awaited. Article 35 forbids a favourable decision for a medicine that does not meet the guide's criteria on costs and health effects, but allows one, with reasons, for an unmet need, institutional health programmes, the effect on how services are organised, a potential long-term benefit, a health emergency at the request of the council, or a request from a public institution or purchaser; in the first five cases the commission asks the applicant to gather more data first. No cost per quality-adjusted life year threshold is stated in the rules.

The Acuerdo published in the Diario Oficial on 18 July 2025 issued general guidelines for an abbreviated regulatory route, in force 30 working days after publication, that recognise as equivalent the requirements, tests and evaluation procedures of reference regulatory authorities and the WHO prequalification programme, and adopt the WHO's good reliance practices. Article 23 names the reference authorities for medicines: founding or standing regulatory members of the ICH, and WHO-Listed Authorities with the marketing authorisation function; for generics, WHO prequalification also counts. The route covers new molecules, generics, innovator biotechnology products, biosimilars, biologicals and vaccines. The product must be identical to the one the reference authority approved, the foreign approval must be no more than 5 years old, and article 20 excludes approvals other than an ordinary one: approvals that themselves relied on another regulator, recognition, accelerated approval, conditional approval, emergency authorisation and court-ordered approval. For innovator biologicals and vaccines the new-molecules committee gives its opinion within fifteen working days. COFEPRIS checks only that the file is complete, and article 37 gives it a maximum of 45 working days to resolve a medicine application. The guidelines replaced the separate equivalence agreements published from 5 October 2012 to 11 June 2025.

Press release 38/2025 of 31 December 2025 reports that during 2025 COFEPRIS authorised 183 clinical trials and granted 312 registrations to allopathic, homeopathic, herbal, biotechnology, vitamin, enteral nutrition and vaccine products, with 127,018,047 vaccine doses authorised, and 2,450 registrations for medical devices; that eleven agreements in the Diario Oficial reduced its procedures from 287 to 106; and that reforms to the Ley General de Salud extended the term for renewing registrations from five to ten years and simplified ethics, research and biosafety committees to make research protocols easier to run. The then commissioner, Armida Zúñiga Estrada, said implementation of international standards had gone from 10% to 90% in a single semester, which would let COFEPRIS submit its letter of intent to be recognised as a WHO-Listed Authority. The release does not separate cancer medicines from the 312 registrations or the trials from other areas, and gives no median time to approval. The press reported in January 2026 that Víctor Hugo Borja Aburto took over as commissioner.

NOM-041-SSA2-2011, published in the Diario Oficial on 9 June 2011, recommends screening mammography for apparently healthy women aged 40 to 69 every two years, does not recommend it under 40, and from 70 limits it to follow-up of women with a previous breast cancer and medical indication; it recommends self-examination from 20 and a clinical breast examination by health staff every year from 25, and requires radiologists reading mammograms to read at least 2,000 a year. The 2007 modification of NOM-014-SSA2-1994 tells first-contact health staff to offer cervical screening to every woman aged 25 to 64, with cytology as the method, visual inspection with acetic acid only where cytology is not available, molecular HPV tests as a complement, and a three-yearly interval after two consecutive negative yearly smears. The Auditoría Superior de la Federación's audit of the 2022 accounts describes the practice in the sector's institutions: cytology every three years for women aged 25 to 34, and a high-risk HPV test every five years for women aged 35 to 64.

The Auditoría Superior de la Federación's performance audit of the Centro Nacional de Equidad de Género y Salud Reproductiva for 2022 found that state health services performed 936,510 screening mammograms in 2021 and 2022 on women aged 40 to 69 who are the ministry's responsibility (431,028 in 2021, 505,482 in 2022), 10.0% of the 9,389,131 such women and 80.7% of the mammograms programmed; by state, coverage ranged from 24.2% in Quintana Roo to 1.1% in Puebla, and the centre attributed the shortfall to rescheduling and delays in maintaining or repairing mammography machines. Of the 2022 mammograms, 0.8% (4,180) were positive. From 2018 to 2022 the services performed 2,232,049 HPV tests on women aged 35 to 64, 20.2% of the eligible women, down from 59.5% in 2018, and no state met its target; the centre cited insufficient supplies, a change of test supplier, late hiring of laboratory staff and unsuitable sampling spaces. The audit also quotes the 2021 to 2024 cancer action programme: in 2018 mammography coverage in Mexico was 24.4%, clinical breast examination 26.7% and cervical screening by cytology and HPV test 46.4%, against the 70% coverage the programme says the WHO recommends for mammography screening to reduce mortality by 20% to 30% in women aged 50 and over, and the 70% it proposes for cervical screening.

Article 20 of the guidelines published on 18 July 2025 says approvals by a reference authority that differ from an ordinary approval cannot support an application, and lists approvals obtained through reliance, recognition, accelerated approval, conditional approval, emergency authorisation, court order and any other scheme different from the ordinary route. This matters for cancer in particular, because some cancer medicines and indications first reach the market in the United States through accelerated approval and in the European Union through conditional marketing authorisation, on response rates before survival results are available. Under the Mexican rules those indications cannot use the 45-working-day route until the reference regulator has converted them to an ordinary approval. Article 29 adds that the foreign approval must have been granted within the last five years, and article 30 requires the applicant to declare that the medicine carries no special warnings from other regulators and has not been withdrawn anywhere for safety or efficacy reasons.

IMSS press release 474/2025, issued in Tlaxcala on 18 September 2025, reports the national launch of the health sector's HPV vaccination campaign, led by the Secretario de Salud, David Kershenobich, with an IMSS target of 875,000 doses mainly for girls and boys in the fifth year of primary school and children under 11 who are not in school, and a sector target of 2.5 million doses. IMSS's director of medical benefits, Alva Alejandra Santos Carrillo, said in the release that including boys was something that had not been done in the country before. The release does not give a dosing schedule, and OnCo did not find a federal source for one. IMSS's website refused scripted requests for the release on 4 November 2026 and no archived copy could be read, so this card could not be rechecked against it that day.

Article 25 of the Ley General para la Detección Oportuna del Cáncer en la Infancia y la Adolescencia requires the doctor who diagnoses cancer in a minor to include the case in the database of the Registro Nacional de Cáncer en la Infancia y Adolescencia, and articles 29 and 30 make that registry a section of the national cancer registry, meant to follow diagnosis, treatment and outcome in real time. When the paediatric module was presented on 22 September 2025, the Secretario de Salud said it would give clear statistics on how cancer behaves in Mexico, and IMSS-Bienestar's director said that all health institutions would take part and that it would make it possible, for the first time, to know precisely how many children's cancers are diagnosed, how they are treated and what their outcomes are. The press report put the estimate of new childhood cancers at 3,000 to 5,000 a year. No data from the module had been published when this page was written.

OnCo's trial records carry what ClinicalTrials.gov lists for each study. 368 of about 6,500 trial records name Mexico among their site countries: 308 phase 3, 18 phase 2/3, 28 phase 2, 13 phase 1/2 and 1 phase 1. By status at the last reading, 89 were recruiting, 179 active but not recruiting, 87 completed and 11 terminated. Non-small-cell lung cancer is the commonest cancer among them (84 trials), then prostate (36) and hormone receptor-positive breast cancer (26). Trials with Mexican sites include KEYNOTE-826 and CALLA in cervical cancer, ToGA and CheckMate 649 in stomach cancer, and the academic INTERLACE and LACC cervical cancer trials. Three are led by the Instituto Nacional de Cancerología, all in lung cancer: metformin with EGFR tablets, nabilone for appetite loss, and glutamine with a probiotic to prevent diarrhoea from EGFR tablets. Across all conditions, ClinicalTrials.gov lists 5,863 studies with Mexico in their site-country field (query of 4 November 2026), and COFEPRIS authorised 183 clinical trials of all kinds in 2025. OnCo's OpenAlex extract of 8 September 2026 (works whose primary topic is in the Oncology subfield, with at least one author in Mexico) counts 2,451 oncology papers from 2021 to 2025, 527 of them in 2025; OpenAlex reclassifies works over time, so its live count differs.

The Instituto Nacional de Cancerología was designated to coordinate the national cancer registry network after the 2017 reform; its coordination centre had nine staff, three of them epidemiologists, and hired the network's 34 registrars, and its authors, including Óscar Arrieta, listed under the institute's Dirección General, published the network's results in Salud Pública de México in 2024. The three investigator-led trials OnCo holds from the institute test metformin added to EGFR tyrosine kinase inhibitors in EGFR-mutant lung cancer, nabilone for anorexia and quality of life in lung cancer, and glutamine plus Lactobacillus reuteri to prevent diarrhoea from EGFR inhibitors. OnCo also holds a 2015 study of BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutations in young Mexican women with triple-negative breast cancer.

The Registro Nacional de Cáncer required by article 161 Bis of the Ley General de Salud since 2017 has published no national incidence figure that OnCo could find, and the registry network's report gives counts and proportions but no rates and no survival. Whether the registry's regulation, due within sixty days of the 2017 reform taking effect, was issued was not checked for this page. The Mérida registry's own published incidence was not read. INEGI publishes deaths by cause, but the per-site death counts for 2024 were not extracted for this page; only the rates by age group in INEGI's release are quoted.

The fund's operating rules leave the list of covered interventions to its technical committee, and the committee's decisions were not found published. The rules were first read from the Internet Archive's copy of 13 January 2026; on 4 November 2026 IMSS-Bienestar's own copy downloaded and was byte-identical to it. The normas were read from the Diario Oficial. Out-of-pocket spending on cancer care, the share of patients in each system, and which states have transferred their health services to IMSS-Bienestar were not researched for this page. The list of cancers covered under the former Seguro Popular catastrophic fund is not repeated here because it may no longer apply.

COFEPRIS's 2025 report gives totals (312 medicine registrations, 183 trials) without a split by therapeutic area or a median time. The Compendio commission's sixty-working-day limit runs from acceptance of a request, and no published series of actual times from registration to listing, or from listing to purchase by IMSS, ISSSTE or IMSS-Bienestar, was found. The national cancer action programme 2021 to 2024 was read only as quoted in the Auditoría Superior de la Federación's audit, not from the programme itself, and the CSG's guide for economic evaluation was not read.