If there is one meaningful and relevant project that the Peter Mutharika administration has done, it is the establishment of a Cancer Treatment Centre, whose corner stone Mutharika laid on Tuesday this week.
Cancer has been a stubborn disease that has scuttled the country’s efforts to provide quality health care services. Trouble with cancer is that, you can hardly have a cause and effect relationship. It is a kind of opportunistic disease that takes advantage of certain trends in society.
It has to do with what one does or does not do as well as what others in society do.
According to a paper by Kellias Phiri Msyamboza et al, published on March 16 2012, there are so many risk factors to cancer. The paper states that HIV, human papilloma virus and overweight are some of the risk factors.
But the shocking part is that even indoor smoke from use of solid fuels such as charcoal and firewood also raises the risk of having cancer. And we all know that no genuine Malawian can run away from the risk of indoor smoke. Even those who steal our tax money get trapped when they use the stolen money to throw lavish parties and have braai. They still inhale the bad smoke and eat their way to an early grave: no escape!
That aside, the other factor is tobacco smoking and harmful use of alcohol. Now, that is where both the thieves and the victims get trapped. The poor Malawians smoke some unrefined tobacco and ingest poorly distilled alcoholic substances. These substances go by the street language of “kill me quick” or mikala bongo (brain cell killers). The thieves come into the mix when they puff away our hard earned cash, through cigars and sometimes the use of pipes.
The arrogance of cancer also manifests itself in that it can choose to attack any part of the body. Essentially, no body part is immune to cancer. Cancer can attack a liver, lung, breast, colorectum, stomach, prostate, cervix, gastric, pancreatic, esophageal, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, among others.
As it is commonly argued, diagnosis has been the major challenge in cancer treatment and management in this country. As Msyamboza et al state, their research reveals that only 17.9 percent of the cases were histologically verified diagnoses, 32.2 percent clinically diagnosed and 49.6 percent of the diagnoses were based on clinical and other investigations.
But trends have shown that even when a person seeks early medical attention, our medics use trial and error methods. Almost every client is told that they have a problem of stomach gas. It is as if this diagnosis is a template for our medics. By the time a cancer case is established, the person has already wasted away. The subsequent treatment regimes only succeed in killing the person in a very painful way.
According to speeches at the Lilongwe ground breaking ceremony, Malawi has 14,000 people living with cancer. But I can state without fear of self-contradiction that this number is just hypothetical. A lot of poor people succumb to deaths that are blamed on witchcraft.
People talk of having a frog on their throats, being injected by witches, and others, oblivious to the fact that it can be cancer of the throat or the lymph. Those cases never find their way in the national population health register.
But Malawians hope that this particular project will come to fruition. On September 25 2012, the then president, Joyce Banda, signed a memorandum of understanding with the US based Biotech Inc in partnership with GB Oncology Group to set up an Oncology and Infectious Disease Clinic at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre. That hospital never saw light of the day.
The Mutharika administration would do Malawians a favour to follow up on that memorandum. Mutharika needs to remove politics from this issue. It is not about Joyce Banda but the suffering Malawians who travel to Tanzania, Zambia, South Africa and India for cancer treatment. Is it not a shame that all our neighbours have cancer treatment centres while we do not, some 53 years after independence?
We need such centres in all the regions for a start. I also remember that the late Bingu wa Mutharika planned to turn Zomba State Lodge into a modern hospital. Can we think of incorporating the cancer centre for the Eastern Region in the Zomba project? Let us interest some partners or the private sector to have another centre in Mzuzu. In that way, the Lilongwe centre will not break from the weight of its load.
We hope that Mutharika’s thieving boys and girls will not deep their dirty fingers in this project. They have stolen enough and can they for once stop stealing from the dead as Jessie Kabwila would have it?
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