Lagos — Chairman of the National Consultative Committee on Cancer Control in Nigeria, Professor Durosimi-Etti, yesterday gave fresh insights into the decision of wife of the President, Mrs Turai Yar'Adua, to push for the establishment of an international cancer center in Abuja.

Speaking to newsmen in Abuja, Durosimi-Etti, who also doubles as the Secretary of the Federal Character Commission (FCC), said the move to establish such an institution was the outcome of the first lady's determination to curb the menace which had claimed the lives of prominent Nigerians in their prime.

Yar'dua, he said, came to the decision after visiting the Anderson Cancer Center in the United States where she drew the inspiration to establish "a cancer institute" that would be wholly dedicated to the treatment and control of the deadly pandemic.

The planned International Cancer, Center, Abuja, whose groundbreaking and fundraising ceremony would take place tomorrow, is "an initiative of the First Lady, Hajiya Turai Yar'Adua. The centre aims at providing whole-person cancer treatment in a compassionate, nurturing environment, using the mother standard of care. It is also the first lady's desire to realise the project as the largest cancer centre in Africa with a design concept modelled to promote the well being of patients and the hospital employees".

According to him "this is going to be the first time we are going to have such a dedicated cancer centre, which is more or less a cancer institute in Nigeria. Not that we don't have cancer departments, of course we have in Zaria, Ibadan, etcetera but this is a cancer institute and they are not many, in fact in Africa, it is only found in North Africa, (Egypt and Tunisia), but not in sub-Saharan Africa.

"So this is a major step. For her Excellency to have gone this far, I think we have to thank God because the centre is going to look at cancer in its entirety, that is pre-empting cancer in the population to preventing, then you are going to look into diagnosis, then you are going to look into various forms of treatment and there are so many of them", he said.

He further noted that "we are going to look into what we call palliative care and pen control that is for those that are so bad, which are the majority of people we have at the moment because people present the case very late".