Is Nigeria winning the war against cancer?

It cannot be over emphasised that cancer and its destructive effects are very much in Nigeria. The  scourge and its ravaging effects have long been a recurring decimal and several  Nigerian families have experienced the agony of losing relations to the disease.

Sadly, in Nigeria, cancer is seen as a death sentence not only because of the nature of the disease but due to a number of reasons such as lack of awareness on the larger proportion of the populace, lack of information, ill equipped hospitals, lack of manpower, high cost of treatment and fewer treatment centres and lack of will power on the government to implement already made policies to tackle the scourge.

Cancer is a class of diseases in which a group of cells display uncontrolled growth, invasion that intrudes upon and destroys adjacent tissues, and sometimes metastasis, or spreading to other locations in the body via lymph or blood. There are various types of cancer, cervical, ovarian, breast, lung, cancer of the blood, and prostrate cancers, among others. However, the most common type of cancer in Nigeria today are breast, cervical and ovarian cancer.

There are two major causes of cancer; environmental factor and others caused by hereditary genetic. Some of the common environmental factors leading to cancer as indicated include: tobacco, bad dieting especially calories, infections, radiation, lack of physical activity, and environmental pollutants. These environmental factors, according to experts cause or enhance abnormalities in the genetic material of cells.

Although, cancer has been described as a killer disease, experts say when detected early, patients diagnosed with these cancers may be cured. Unfortunately, the health seeking behaviour of Nigerians has continued to hinder successful treatment of cancer. According to the Minister of Health, many patients present late to the hospitals.

Presently in Nigeria, cancer incidences are common. No week passes that you do not hear that a Nigerian has died of cancer.  Hundreds of thousands  are dying silently. Not much appears to have been done to stem the tide of deaths.

Just last week, the minister of Health, Professor Onyebuchi Chukwu disclosed that data collected from 11 Federal tertiary hospitals by the National System of Cancer Registries showed 7,000  new documented cases of cancer which also corresponded with the average estimated 100,000 new cases of cancer reported in Nigeria annually. From the data, 60 per cent of cancers occur in women and 39.8 per cent in men.

Breast cancer accounts for 40 per cent of women cancers, closely followed by cervical cancer of 17.9 per cent, lymphomas and ovarian cancer are next.  “Whereas in men, the commonest reported cancer is prostate cancer which accounts for 29.2 per cent of male cancers, closely followed by colorectal cancer and lymphomas.