But up to now, Kenya does not have a cancer national registry to give the exact number of cancer cases.
Plans to expand cancer centres to Meru, Nyeri, Kisumu, Mombasa and Eldoret have materialised but the centres still lack proper technical and human capacity to handle the disease fully.
“These centres are just new centres. They are crawling; they are not walking yet. Therefore, most of the aspects of the treatment will be done in Nairobi,” Dr Njuguna explained.
Dr Geoffrey Mutuma, a cancer specialist and a doctor at Zambezi Hospital feels that declaring cancer a national disaster like HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis will greatly improve the country’s response to the killer disease.
“Once we took serious action on HIV/AIDS, it went down. And that is the same thing we should do with cancer.”
“We are not saying cancer will go down, but we can be able to detect the disease early enough. We should focus on early detection and early treatment,” he explained.
The worrying trends of cancer, Dr Mutuma noted, will continue to claim more lives if the government does not also seriously focus on reducing the cost of treating the disease.
“If we don’t do anything in Kenya in the next 10 years, cancer will be killing more people than all other diseases combined. Cancer can lead to instant poverty. It is a disease that takes years to be managed.”
According to Dr Mutuma, cancer patients die due to late presentation and treatment or lack of it.
It’s estimated that four in every five cancer patients present their cases at late stages (between stage three and four).
Dr Njuguna expressed concerns that a good number of Kenyans resort to ‘alternative health seeking behaviours’ which complicates treatment of cancer.
In his view, there is an information gap on cancer detection and treatment which he says should be a major centre of focus in the management of cancer.
Whereas there has been an increase in awareness and diagnostic capacity compared to 10 years ago, the paradox, Dr Njuguna says, is that treatment of cancer has not improved at the same rate – therefore, leading to an accumulation of cancer patients.
Kenya currently has about 10 radio therapy machines which serve the entire country with most of them being in the hands of private hospitals.
The Kenyatta National Hospital has only two of them.
According to Dr Njuguna, apart from increasing cancer equipment, plans are at an advanced stage to train cancer specialists locally.
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