KISUMU governor Anyang’ Nyong’o has challenged Kenya to confront the cancer epidemic by training more specialists instead of just building cancer centres.
Prof Nyong’o, a prostate cancer survivor, said there are many myths about the “emperor of all maladies” according to one scholar, and it was the business of specialists to separate grain from chaff.
These untruths “must be exposed by researchers and scholars so that we deal with the real thing,” said Prof Nyong’o at the burial of Joyce Laboso who was the governor of Bomet County. A former university don, Dr Laboso, was first diagnosed with cancer in 1991 but the disease recurred, killing her at Nairobi Hospital.
Indeed, Dr Laboso, former Kibra MP Ken Okoth, and ex-Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore succumbed to the disease within one month. But many more die of the disease in the quiet of their homes because they are not public figures and have no access to treatment.
This string of deaths led to speculation, especially on social media where people were forwarding all manner of literature on what causes, fuels, and manages the disease that kills thousands in Kenya every year.
Communications expert Washington Akumu condemned “fake punditry on cancer that is being bandied about” through his Facebook account, terming the speculations “downright galling to some of us who have had an intimate experience with cancer.”
Prof Nyong’o, a former don, an ex-minister of health and planning, asked Kenya to “invest in research and education, and specialisation,”, saying, for example that a medical physicist is required to operate a linear accelerator, which is used in radiation. Although early and regular screening is required to raise chances of survival, without the experts, screening may not make sense, a case that has seen the number of Kenyans going to foreign countries for screening and treatment going up.
“What is important about cancer is getting people who are specialised in various types of cancer,” he said, pointing out that at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), where he was treated, “I found people who are specialised in cancer of the arm, cancer of the neck, cancer of the head, cancer of the knee, na kadhalika (among others).”
He could not be more forthright. One of the most lethal attackers of progress is untruth, generalisations or myths that engulf and kill useful debate in the quest to pull a people from the precipice of ignorance, disease and hunger that Kenya identified at Independence as major woes. They remain.
Untruth can seep through and find space among people, who may die because of believing in myths and half-truths. But it is the educated who will help in directing assessment of situations and woes.
Cancer is killing more than 33,000 Kenyans annually while treatment costs, according to the State insurer National Hospital Insurance Fund (NHIF), have soared to more than Sh1.3 billion.
Indeed, even the Bible records that people perish because they lack knowledge. And, it is the business of experts to provide knowledge to keep death at bay.
