BY PATIENCE IVIE IHEJIRIKA and ROYAL IBE,
Since the progression of COVID-19 to a pandemic, the Nigerian healthcare systems have experienced severe difficulties coping with patient care for both COVID-19 and other diseases especially non communicable diseases like cancer, LEADERSHIP learnt.
Already, the country’s health sector is bedevilled by weak health systems, ill equipped cancer treatment centres, with obsolete machines and grossly inadequate oncologists required to treat patients with cancer.
It was learnt that there are only eight cancer centres with functional machines, both public and private, in the country as against a minimum of 200 cancer centres or 600 units of radiotherapy machines that Nigeria is expected to have to meet the World Health Organisation (WHO) standard.
WHO said that cancer is one of the leading causes of death globally and accounted for 8.8 million deaths in 2015.
An estimated 116,000 new cases of cancer and 41,000 cancer-related deaths, the world health body said were recorded in Nigeria in 2018 alone.
World Cancer Day is an international event observed every February 4 to raise awareness on the disease and to encourage its prevention, detection and treatment.
Stakeholders insisted that inadequate experts, radiotherapy machines and high cost of treatment have remained a burden to health workers, cancer patients and their families. They attributed the high mortality rate from cancer in Nigeria to the above listed factors, stressing that the situation was compounded by the fact that less than 100 oncologists operate in all the centres in the country.
Mrs Chioma Nnabuchi, a 45 year old lady, diagnosed with stage 1 cancer, couldn’t stop crying while narrating the challenges of getting an oncologist for her treatment.
According to her, she would have done the surgery since last year, but there was never an oncologists at the Lagos State University Teaching Hospital…
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