The baffled me

I have been vehemently baffled by how cancer has become a world epidemic; affecting both young and old, rich and poor. Not only is this disease deadly but it’s also expensive to treat. Which makes me wonder – do the poor stand a chance in surviving cancer? Why the rapid blow-out of the disease?

Maybe it’s always been there but I just didn’t care enough to know about the deadly disease. I guess you never really know or care about something unless you find yourself in a situation where you must start knowing and caring. My sister-in-law was diagnosed with Lymphoma and is fighting the painful disease. I sit and think is she getting enough help? So I decided to surf the net and find out more about cancer in general.

I have gone on to the sahealthinfo website and found the following: OVERVIEW OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN CANCER RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT AS A BASIS FOR DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING THE ACTIVATION OF CARISA (Cancer Research Initiative of South Africa).

“Cancer is a highly complex, ubiquitous and devastating disease causing 10 million new diagnoses world-wide per annum. Of these, 6.7 million will succumb and at present there are 24.6 million cancer patients living with cancer and hoping to survive. 

In most countries where cancer surveillance is done, data is collected on incidence (new diagnoses) and mortality (death certificates). A ratio of mortality to incidence, calculated as age standardised rates (ASR), gives a measure of the lethality of a particular cancer. Highly lethal cancers such as liver, pancreas, oesophagus and lung have mortality rates close to the incidence rates while breast, colon and prostate have considerably lower ratios of 0.36, 0.51 and 0.32 respectively.

When South African mortality data from the MRC Burden of Disease Unit (2000) was studied in relation to incidence data from the National Cancer Registry of the NHLS (1999) it was unexpectedly found that in the case of six out of ten most common cancers (e.g. lung, oesophagus, stomach, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, liver and bladder) the mortality rates were significantly higher than the incidence rates, which is impossible. In the case of prostate, breast, colorectal and cervical cancers, the mortality rates were lower than the incidence rates - as expected. The unfortunate conclusion from this comparative study is that the National Cancer Registry is not reliable in many cases and probably suffers from large scale under-reporting of cancer in South Africa. It was calculated on the basis of the assumption that South Africa and the World had the same ratio of morbidity to incidence rates of 0.62, that the under-reporting could be as large as 54 507 cases in 1999-2000.  If this is indeed so, the annual incidence of new cancer patients in South Africa is not 60 000 as reported by the NCR (1999) but possibly closer to 114 000 p.a.! There are also indications that this under-reporting is more extensive in the Black rather than in the White South African population group and the reasons for this are not clear. It is of considerable importance to find out what the situation is of South Africans with cancer who’s cancer diagnoses (if any) do not reach the NCR. It is concluded that mortality data is all that we really have to monitor cancer in South Africa with any degree of certainty. We really do not know for sure what the real incidence of cancer in South Africa is. It is also concluded that in general the cancer surveillance infrastructure in South Africa is not at all optimal and needs concerted attention and extra funding from the health authorities in order to create a reasonable foundation/platform on which to conduct cancer research and control. Without this we can hardly expect to win the war against cancer. One potential remedy supported by the surveillance fraternity is to legislate that all new cancer diagnoses are notifiable to the NCR, irrespective of the technique of diagnosis used, i.e. pathological or clinical.”

These stats obviously have increased since 2000. My worry now is: Is there enough resources to help cancer victims? Are there enough doctors? There are just so many questions and too little answers.

So many awareness campaigns have been done and we are still not winning. What can we do as caring citizens?

Having read the abstract from sahealthinfo I can’t help but wonder how we can collectively reduce the number of mortality in cancer.

I would love to be one of the people that live to make a difference. So I urge all those who have been left in awe by the abstract included in this article to join me in making a difference.

The awareness that I think needs to be made to people is encouraging them to go for check-ups regularly and make sure that people are well informed about the disease.