AfrOx and the CancerSociety of Ghana
The CancerSociety of Ghana (CSG) has been in existence for the past five years. It is an NGO with charitable status. For the past five years the CSG has undertaken a lot of programmes. The CSG was the first organisation to organise palliative courses for healthcare practitioners in Ghana and, so far, courses have been run in six out of the ten regions in Ghana.
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--Reverend Fr. Victor Sackey,
Executive Secretary, Cancer Society of Ghana
Life of a Cervical Cancer Patient in Ghana
When I first walked into the room labelled brachytherapy in the hospital in Ghana's second city, Kumasi, it seemed fairly empty. There was just one nurse sitting at a wooden desk. But she was watching a black‐and‐white monitor, and there on the screen was a woman lying very still on a bed in a cell‐like room. Broad tubes emerged near her feet from under the crumpled sheets. For the safety of staff, she was separated from them by several heavy, lead doors while she had the radioactive treatment. Still a young woman, she has cervical cancer, the most common form of cancer in [Ghanaian women].
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--Claudia Hammond,
BBC Radio Presenter
Paediatric Cancer in Africa
The majority of children who develop cancer in Africa receive no curative therapy, and many receive no supportive or palliative care either. Contributory factors include family and national poverty; other overwhelming health priorities (malnutrition, diarrhoea, and infections including malaria, tuberculosis and HIV); lack of access to consistent supplies of the necessary drugs, and lack of trained staff to deliver care. Abandonment of treatment is high and reported survival low (10% or less) in, for example, Senegal, Tanzania and Sudan.
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--Tim Eden,
Teenage Cancer Trust Professor of Teenage and Young Adult Cancer, University of Manchester