Editor, RE: "Africa is in danger of sleepwalking into a cancer crisis” (The New Times, February 5).

And we can be sure that the new untested food products, including GMO-based toxic "foods” that are being pushed on Africans to replace our more natural food products, won't fail to explode our cancer rates, diabetes, high blood pressure and other killer diseases.

We are what we eat, and we are moving away from our traditional foods to what we think—wrongly—are more desirable western ones but whose true negative consequences we will only realise when it is already too late.

It is really critical we apply the precautionary principle fully while considering wider public adoption of insufficiently tested products.

Public health is more important than rapid introduction of technologies whose long-term effects have not been reliably determined by non-industry influenced research. Mwene Kalinda