Global Health
African countries are facing rising rates of cancer. What’s being done about it?
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Cancer diagnoses are on the rise in sub-Saharan Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean regions, but care lags behind.
Cancer was once a rare diagnosis in Nigeria, but doctors are now coping with an increase in cancer patients, and experts believe that this trend will continue. NPR’s Durrie Bouscaren reports.
DURRIE BOUSCAREN, BYLINE: Oluwadare Titilayo lives in Ado Ekiti, a small city in southern Nigeria. When she found a lump in her breast, she says, it felt like a death sentence. Her three daughters were still young.
OLUWADARE TITILAYO: If I die of this thing, who would be able to care for my girl?
BOUSCAREN: Titilayo learned she would need a mastectomy, multiple rounds of chemotherapy, and many of the medications she needed weren’t available where she lived. So she had to find them from another state, pay for them herself and bring them to the hospital. Everything fell on her shoulders.
TITILAYO: The burden of getting the chemotherapy drugs – the burden was on me.
BOUSCAREN: Several years later, Titilayo says, the ordeal stays with her.
TITILAYO: It feels terribly bad within me, then the stigma, the gossips, the rejection, but I still insist that my life is worth more than any trauma or any emotional issue.
BOUSCAREN: The World Health Organization’s latest global status report on cancer is out this month. It projects that in Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean regions, the number of people receiving a cancer diagnosis every year will more than double by 2050. In Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, Dr. Basira Lawal sees this firsthand. About 70% of her patients, she says, are diagnosed at Stage 3 or 4, when the cancer has already spread into surrounding tissues.
BASIRA LAWAL: You know, we’re wondering, is it that we’re creating more awareness for people, and that’s why they’re coming in, or are the numbers just increasing?
BOUSCAREN: Lawal is 1 of about 80 oncologists in the entire country, a nation of 242 million people. She says many doctors train in Nigeria but move abroad for jobs elsewhere. But Nigeria’s older population is growing. More people are living urban, sedentary lifestyles, which may contribute to their cancer risk, Lawal says. But some cases don’t fit the pattern she expects, like a recent patient who was diagnosed with colorectal cancer at 19. And getting patients to treatment is lagging behind.
LAWAL: The radiotherapy facilities are quite few and they’re quite far in between.
BOUSCAREN: About half of cancer patients are treated with radiation, but there are only about 15 radiation therapy machines in Nigeria.
LAWAL: So sometimes you have patients traveling, you know, maybe eight hours.
BOUSCAREN: So every morning, when Lawal gets to work, she sees a crowd of patients waiting. Nigeria’s government is working with international organizations to improve access to cancer care. Jennifer Dent is CEO of BIO Ventures for Global Health, one of those groups.
JENNIFER DENT: The government’s actually investing in the infrastructure – that’s highly costly – and the systems.
BOUSCAREN: The government and the international groups are also trying to prevent new cases, Dent says. For example, cervical cancer can be prevented with a vaccine against human papillomavirus, or HPV. But cervical cancer is one of the most common cancers diagnosed in Nigeria, Kenya and other African countries. In 2019, Kenya added the HPV vaccine to its routine immunization program. In 2023, Nigeria followed suit.
DENT: There’s a lot of mistrust in vaccines in Nigeria, but there’s some highly influential champions for cervical cancer in the country that I think are doing phenomenal work.
BOUSCAREN: Steps like these, Dent says, can help countries prepare for a future where cancer diagnoses are increasingly common.
Durrie Bouscaren, NPR News, Washington.
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