PESHAWAR, Feb 5: As the World Cancer Day passed by quietly, people afflicted with the dreaded disease continue to suffer due to shortage of specialist doctors and treatment facilities in the province.
The situation is expected to improve as the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission has started construction of three more 100-bed hospitals for cancer patients, one each in Swat, Dera Ismail Khan and Bannu. These hospitals will be completed in three years.
At present, cancer patients in the province are mostly seen by doctors other than oncologists.
The province’s only two treatment centres, the 75-bed Institute of Radiology and Nuclear Medicines (Irnum) in Peshawar and the Institute of Nuclear Oncology and Radiation in Abbottabad, are not enough to cater to the load of patients. The centres are supposed to cater to the needs of people from the NWFP and Fata, and Afghan refugees living here. Thirty per cent of the patients visiting the facilities are said to be Afghan refugees.
Mostly, people suffering from ailments like breast, lung, pancreas, liver and prostate cancer or leukaemia and lymphoma are being treated by surgeons and physicians not qualified to treat such patients.A case in point is a 25-year-old patient of leukaemia who had been told by physicians in a city hospital a few years ago that he would not survive. The patient’s acquaintances had taken him to an oncologist who treated him and now he is working as a salesman.
A young doctor suffering from throat cancer had been pronounced incurable by a physician in Peshawar. He was called by his elder brother to the US where he was treated and now he is absolutely normal.
Cancer can be cured provided the patients contact the right doctor at the right time, but in the Frontier province patients are often diagnosed at the terminal stage.
At Irnum, patients have to wait for weeks for admission and treatment. About 5,500 patients were registered for treatment last year, and 10,000 to 12,000 visited the facility for diagnostic services.
Experts also blame the federal government for the situation in the Frontier province. According to them, there are 10 full-fledged cancer wards in different cities of Sindh, 15 in Punjab, three in Islamabad and one in Balochistan.
Irnum, the main hospital of the NWFP for treating cancer patients, was established in 1974. The federal government has repeatedly been proposing in its five-year plans that cancer treatment and diagnostic facilities will be provided at every teaching hospital of the country.
Irnum has the services of about 20 doctors, most of whom are near retirement.
Specialists say most of patients visit hospital in the last stage of the disease, which is incurable.
The disease has so far killed nine million people globally. In Pakistan, oncologists say, 300,000 cases of cancer are reported every year.
