Nigerians Pay For Cancer Treatment With Their Lives

[Shola Sholaz]

Onyinyechi Okafor, an intelligent and healthy 14- year-old girl, never had previous history of head injury or trauma before she was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of brain tumour known as Brain Stem Glioma in January this year. The entire left side of her body is paralysed and she is seeking assistance to raise N5 million to undergo an urgent life-saving brain surgery in an Indian hospital.
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The case of 25-year-old Linda Godwin is not entirely different from Onyinyechi's.
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Following a diagnosis of invasive ductal carcinoma, SBR Grade III, synchronous bilateral breast cancer, Linda, who has lost her right breast and is undergoing chemotherapy to mange her very critical state of health, is languishing at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), in search of about N500,000 every three weeks to stay alive.
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These two cases only represent the tip of the iceberg  of the cost of cancer care and management in Nigeria. Financial constraint is the bane of most cancer patients seeking treatment.
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More than two million Nigerians are known to have some form of invasive cancer, an estimated 100,000 are diagnosed annually, of which at least 80,000 die, making cancer one of the nation's highest causes of death. Although most cancer patients are not "catastrophic" overall, cancer is one of the most expensive disorders to treat and manage.
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The total life time cost of handling cancer in Nigeria iscolossal, perhaps unquantifiable. For the rich, only palliative care is available in most cases of late presentation, while for the poor, there is little or no hope for survival.  Everything about cancer is expensive. Cost of treatment of cervical cancer, colon cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer and any kind of cancer for that matter is mind boggling. Even the routine cancer therapy is no more affordable in Nigeria, than elsewhere. It is an expensive and impoverishing disease. "The poor cannot survive cancer and even the rich do not always survive".

[Folami David]

Cancer is a very deadly kind of disease so it's a sad thing to know that people are living with it currently as we speak....May God spare their lives!