It is true cancer cases are many. It is also true cancer is killing. There is a lot more awareness. There is a lot of diagnosis taking place.
There are people who are undergoing treatment, the population is getting aware. So the cases are becoming many and they are being identified more than they were a long time ago.
The population is also increasing so with the increasing population, we are more likely to see more people diagnosed.
Our population is ageing and with the ageing population, we are also more likely to see more people with cancer.
HIV/AIDS was an epidemic and was clearly caused by sex and people could understand. Cancer is not one disease.
Cancer is many diseases, only a few (types of cancer) have known causes, a number of cancers have no known cause, to be honest.
If you went there (mass screening) and even fired up the entire population, you would end up making everybody anxious about the risk of developing cancer.
You need to look for good facilities for diagnosis; you need to look for good treatment centres and you will need to treat the cases.
Otherwise just goading them will not work. Only a few cases, if screened and treated early, will have a positive outcome.
There are those cancers which, even if you find out early and treated early, you may not change the outcome in a significant way.
There are some which you will never detect early even if you wanted to do so and they don’t occur in large numbers that might allow you to target say 10,000 people and hope to get one.
So what do you do with such? And then you will have spent a lot of money in looking for them and you haven’t got them in a particular population.
As to whether it is a national disaster, I have no idea and I cannot commit myself to that.
I find it very difficult to say whether cancer is a national disaster or not. I don’t know the criteria for declaring cancer a national disaster.
Prof. Nicholas Abinya spoke to the Star
