Cancer run should awaken us all in fight

The annual Rotary Cancer Run happened on Sunday in Kampala, with more than 40,000 participants taking part, raising a respectable Shs1.4 billion to fight the disease.

 To begin with, we would like to congratulate everyone who was involved in the run and give a thumbs-up to the Rotarians for the noble cause.

 The run came days after this newspaper reported that the government had earmarked Shs310 billion to purchase and install modern equipment for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer across the country.

 Dr Nixon Niyonzima, the head of research and training at the Uganda Cancer Institute (UCI), said the money will be used to buy a Positron emission tomography (PET) scan, a modern diagnostic machine that is used to determine the exact point the cancer is in the body.

This is good news and we welcome such initiatives that are taking us in the right direction in the bid to curb the disease.

 These developments come amid concerns of a rise in the number of cancer cases handled annually at the UCI over the years.

 The number of patients, for example, handled in 2015 stood at 4,000, but in 2020, it shot up to 7,400 and it has been rising since then, according to Dr Niyonzima.

 The increases were attributed to the high number of women presenting with cervical and breast cancers, and men with prostate cancer, cases of lymphoma in children, among others. Children, notably, contributed to 10 percent of the new cases.

There have been reports of efforts to build more cancer centres across the country so that patients do not spend all their resources travelling to Kampala.

 We should not in this era be receiving news that patients spend nights outside wards because the facilities cannot accommodate them or that the personnel cannot attend to them in time.

 It doesn’t get rosy, with about 22,000 deaths in the country due to cancer annually.

 There isn’t a clear cause of cancer, although the lighter bit of it is that when detected early cancer can be cured.

 In addition, the risk of cancer before the age of 65 years is 10 percent, and in the next five years, it is estimated that there will be 80,000 cancer cases in the country at any one time.

The burden before us, therefore, is an enormous one that must be taken by its horns.

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