Why Cancer should be declared a national disaster

Cancer

Will the much-heralded Universal Health Coverage (UHC), a major plank of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Big Four Agenda, extend its benefits to cancer patients?

That is the question on the lips of patients, survivors, lobby groups and the leaders of organisations involved in the treatment and care of one of the most dreaded non-communicable diseases (NCDs), thanks to its costly nature.

Cancer survivor and founder of community organisation Breast Cancer Kenya Josephine Sitawa is categorical: “Cancer should be declared a national disaster.”

Ms Sitawa, 35, discussed with a local daily the economic cost of a disease that tends to be limited to its debilitating physical impact and the pain it causes patients.

Xeloda — the brand name for an anti-cancer-chemotherapy drug Capecitabine — has to be administered every two to three weeks at a cost of between Sh30,000 and 40,000, Ms Sitawa says.

“Remember, this is a woman with no money. She has been relieved of her duties and most likely parted with her husband and her family because of the stigma associated with disease. Patients would rather stay hungry in the house, where they are perceived to be doomed to die, than seek help to buy food,” she says of a disease with great psychological and physical impact.

Another chemo drug, Herceptin (Trastuzumab) costs between Sh150,000 and Sh250,000 per cycle of three to four weeks, “depending on the supplier and the economic situation in the country”. Most patients, Ms Sitawa says, “give up and wait to die”.

Breast Cancer Kenya is seeking a memorandum of understanding with the National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF), irrespective of whether or not the President’s UHC will cover cancer.

And not just for breast cancer. Cervical cancer, which causes continuous bleeding, requires two packets of sanitary pads daily, which is way beyond the means of an already vulnerable lot.

The prohibitive cost of cancer has heightened the clamour to declare it a national disaster, as Laikipia Woman Representative Catherine Waruguru did when she filed a Motion in Parliament to that effect on March 21.

She also called for the establishment of a cancer fund to cater for patients’ treatment and care, noting that cancer causes more deaths than HIV, TB and malaria combined.

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