Nigeria: Dealing With the Cancer Scourge

7 February 2014

Tuesday was World Cancer Day, a day set aside every year to raise awareness about the deadly disease while pressing governments and other critical stakeholders to take action against the scourge. Unfortunately, not much of that awareness was created in our country even when no fewer than 10 Nigerians die every hour from cancer going by statistics from the National Cancer Prevention Programme (NCPP). Even more worrisome is the fact that even when some of the victims are properly diagnosed, they remain helpless because there are no facilities to treat them. The alarming rate of death from cancer therefore points to the state of our medical institutions.

It is bad enough that cancer is a terminal disease, but it is worse that most Nigerian medical centres lack the diagnostic capacity to quickly detect and treat cancer infections. This has greatly compounded the problem, forcing several Nigerians to travel to countries like India, the Emirates, United Kingdom, etc., in search of treatment for the disease. The economic consequence of this is that it has led to so much capital flight while most medical experts are now agreed that the disease has become an important health care concern for the country.

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