The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | Close to 22,000 people succumbed to different cancers over the last one year. This is according to records from the Uganda Cancer Institute head office in Kampala.
The Kampala Cancer Register shows that 32,617 new cases were recorded in 2018. This indicates at least 350 new cancer patients detected per 100,000 people compared to 2008 when the figure stood 250 per 100,000 people.
The most common cancers included cancer of the cervix, breast cancer, and kaposis sarcoma, cancer of the stomach, lymphoma and liver cancer in women. In males, prostate cancer, cancer of the esophagus, liver and lymphoma, were highly detected while leukemia, Burkitt’s lymphoma, kidney and sarcomas were most common in children.
Dr Jackson Orem, the executive director of Uganda Cancer Institute-UCI says that the high number of deaths was caused by late diagnosis. “When cancer is on the increase, it means so are the deaths because, at any one time, it is estimated that 80 percent of all cancer patients die due to late diagnosis,” he said, adding that 30 percent of all cancer cases are curable if detected early.
Dr Orem says the most common causes of cancers are in infections that most times go untreated.
The head of the Non Communicable Diseases Unit at the health ministry Dr Gerald Mutungi says the ministry is promoting early diagnosis of cancer through training health workers all health center IIIs on cancer detection.
To deal with the increase in cancer patients, UCI is also set to have two more functional radiotherapy machines by the end of 2019. One of the machines was a donation from India while the other was procured from the United State of America. Dr Orem says three functional machines will be in the country by May 2019.
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