ecancermedicalscience

Special Issue

Cancer in Africa: the way forward

25 Jul 2019
Peter Boyle, Twalib Ngoma, Richard Sullivan, Otis Brawley

While progress in oncology has been remarkable in recent decades, not every cancer patient is benefitting from the advances made in treating their disease. The contrast in diagnosis, treatment and its outcome between high-resource and low-resource countries is dramatic. Africa presents an enormous challenge with population growth and life expectancy increasing in many countries as the toll of AIDS and other communicable diseases declines. However, there has been little investment in capacity of any sort to deal with the current cancer problem, never mind the rapid increase in incidence which is underway. This is a critical area for investment and not only of a purely financial nature. It is bad to have cancer and worse to have cancer if you are poor. The gap between rich and poor, highly educated and less educated and the North–South divide is substantial and continuing to grow. Radical solutions are urgently needed: the status quo is not an appropriate response to the current situation. Recognising that no single government or source of philanthropy has the means to solve this problem, new models are needed to cope with and improve this situation.

Related Articles

Badira Cheriyalinkal Parambil, Girish Chinnaswamy, Maya Prasad, Venkata Rama Mohan Gollamudi, Ajay Puri, Ashish Gulia, Sajid Qureshi, Prakash Nayak, Manish Pruthi, Siddhartha Laskar, Nehal Khanna, Jifmi Jose Manjali, Amit Janu, Sneha Shah, Nilendu Purandare, Mukta Ramadwar, Poonam Panjwani, Bharat Rekhi, Pallavi Rane, Shripad Banavali
Nairica Eurico Rebello, Anita Spadigam, Anita Dhupar, Jochima Cota, Vikas Dhupar
Tooba Ali, Laraib Khan, Bilal Mazhar Qureshi, Asim Hafiz, Maria Tariq, Khurram Minhas, Nasir Ali, Ahmed Nadeem Abbasi
Solomon Kibudde, Awusi Kavuma, Bonny Abal, Moses Fredrick Katumba, Cissy Bangidde Namutale, Daniel Kanyike, Israel Luutu