Cancer is undoubtedly a huge problem in Africa, and has weighed down so much on the continent, causing massive loss of lives, deforming many people and draining a lot of families of their finances.
According to the World Health Organization, cancer is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, with approximately 14 million new cases and 8.2 million cancer related deaths in 2012 alone.
According to the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), about 715,000 new cancer cases and 542,000 cancer related deaths occurred in 2008 in Africa.
These numbers are projected to nearly double (1.28 million new cancer cases and 970,000 cancer deaths) by 2030, simply due to the aging and growth of the population, with the potential to be even higher because of the adoption of behaviours and lifestyles associated with economic development, such as smoking, unhealthy diet, and physical inactivity.
Among other things, cancer is a great cause of physical deformities, emotional afflictions, families’ financial burdens as well as social problems.
The treatment of cancer consumes a lot of money that could otherwise be directed to other purposes within the family such as education of children.
In the treatment of cancer, patients often lose some body parts as this is said to be the surest way of ensuring the cancer cells do not spread to other parts of the body.
Despite this growing burden however, cancer continues to receive low public health priority on Africa, largely due to the rather unlimited resources and other more prioritised public health problems such as AIDS.
Cancer related to infectious agents (cervix, liver, Kaposi sarcoma, urinary bladder) are among the most dominant types of the disease in Africa.
In 2008, cervical cancer accounted for 21% of the total newly diagnosed cancers in females and liver cancer for 11% of the total cancer cases in males.
Tackling the threat caused by cancer should be prioritized in Africa in order to save the thousands of lives lost annually due to the disease.
Encouragingly however, there has been a lot of focus lately on early detection of the disease. Governments have rolled out early cancer detection campaigns across Africa in order to ease the fight against it at an early stage when it is said to be manageable.
