Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa on Thursday opened a $10-million (about R68-million) specialist cancer hospital which will enable patients to receive treatment at home for the first time.
Mwanawasa said the National Cancer Diseases Hospital (NCDH) was built following a growth in the number of cancer patients in Zambia who have previously had to be treated abroad at a cost to the state of an average $10 000 per person.
“Treatment at the hospital will be on a cost-sharing basis between patient and the government,” Mwanawasa said at the opening in the capital Lusaka.
The ultra-modern hospital was built with the financial from several international donors while the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Oil Producing and Exporting Countries will offer radiotherapy for cancer treatment.
Health Minister Brian Chituwo said the hospital would also cater for patients from other African countries
Over 3,000 new cancer cases are being detected in every one million Zambians, annually.
And government used to spend about K50 million to send one cancer patient to South Africa and Zimbabwe for treatement.
Mr. Mwanawasa who refelected on statistics between 1995 and 2004 said of the 5,000 cancer cases that required radiotherapy abroad, only 350 received treatment and the rest died because they could not be treated.
He is not even ashamed to grace this occasion with such statistics – one would hope that with such information right under his nose, he might do something to avert 4650 deaths that didn’t have any radiotherapy – most logical is to localise these facilities rather than evacuate, more so that we are being told our finances are improving!!
First of all, I will wait to be convinced on how these figures were generated. There’s no surveillance system in Zambia to give such estimate by population. My hunch is this estimate is over the top. But i know cancer is a long, debilitating disease even if the numbers are low.
No offence intended to cancer sufferes, but politicians are more keen to put up a fancy $3.5 billion clinic at UTH than do the basics first.
How many more Zambians are dying of maternal conditions, TB, malaria in rural areas?
Pa Zed twalikwata abachaya radiotherapy not uku import aba ku cuba.This guyz are just stealin money and inffeecting our young sisters and brothers with HIV. Anyway its a good step to development.
#2Francis, there is indeed a Cancer Registry, though, its inclusivity may be questioned. Last time I looked @ it, problems that surfaced were that returns were quite poor when it came to rural areas, this was compounded with incomplete returns in urban areas becoz people only remembered to fill them in when the landed on their desks, reason being,people were more preoccupied with other daily occurring conditions, & HIV & Kaposi’s just skewed the records.
Bauze: Exactly my point that the cancer registry records the few people who manage to visit facilities mostly already with advanced disease. So the statistical process of extrapolating that data to the population (incidence) is unexplained. And if you are going to spend $3.5 million, you cant be so flimsy with data. For example, the HMIS which is far better managed than cancer registry records 7000 malaria deaths in Zambia per year, the National Malaria Control Program quotes 50,000 while some other estimates put it at 25,000. We got same problem with mental health and all the so called small diseases. Sounds fussy but these are the questions MOH has failed to answer at Finance.
Good news to the nation for the cancer hosipital. Is it a hospital on it’s own grounds or is it a cancer clinic at UTH? Can someone enlighten us on this. We hope the hospital or clinic will not become like UTH with no proper equipment and no specialist Zambian doctors due to poor conditions of service.
Now, why Zambia always depend on outside aid to build hospitals and markets when we are told that the economy has turned around with the revamping of the mines. Where is the tax millions dollars from the mines going?
l do agree with Francis that many pipo die of such conditions which can easily be managed or indeed prevented.But the question is Can we say we will only build a Catheter Lab for Heart Attacks management if the death toil in other conditions is lowered or minimized?While we are a poor nation l think we need to move and start to build something modern for the future so that when the Cancer cases reach unacceptable levels we will have a radio center to refer our patients to.Maternal and Child deaths,malaria and HIV/AIDs l believe is receiving more attention than any other conditions world wide Zambia inclusive.So my understanding to this venture is that while someone is helping us do something about AIDs we should also do something about CANCER!!!!
Radiotherapy will alleviate suffering from cancer symptoms. The vast majority of cancer victims in the world isn’t in the developed world…it is in developing countries such as Zambia.
Hope the resources are used to help the people who need it the most and not the privileged few.
A step in the right direction!!
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