…FG establishes 6 cancer centres
By Our Reporter
Eight out of the 14 radiotherapy machines in Nigeria are not safe, the Nigerian Nuclear Regulatory Authority (NNRA), has revealed.
Speaking at the World Cancer Day Symposium organized by Project Pink Blue in Abuja, on Monday, the Director General of the NNRA, Ya’u Usman Idris, further disclosed that only six out of the 14 radiotherapy centers in Nigeria are licensed by the regulatory body-the NNRA.
He regretted that some radiotherapy centers licenced by his agency to contribute to cancer care in the country are faulty, hence, not functional.
Idris also lamented the lack of capacity and insufficient experts to improve cancer care in the country.
According to him: “We have serious problems as far cancer care is concerned in Nigeria. There’s nothing to celebrate today but to lament. Looking at the case of Nigeria, we have only 14 radiotherapy machines in the country and nine of them belong to the government, five of them belong to private hospital and only six of them are licensed by the Nigeria Nuclear Regulatory Authority which means, the others are not safe.
“In terms of equipment, Nigeria has only seven Linacs (Linear accelerators), for a population of 200 million people.
“South Africa has 92, Egypt has 76, if you compare those two countries with Nigeria, even the ones we have are not functioning, because today they are functioning, tomorrow they are down.
“If you go to the Nuclear Medicine, we have only two Nuclear Medicine centres that have gamma cameras and both of them are down at the National Hospital, Abuja, and University College Hospital, Ibadan.
‘Virtually there’s no gamma camera that is working in Nigeria whereas a country like Tunisia with a population of over 22 million has about 14 of such machines working.
“We have only one Positron Emissing Tomograph Computed Tomography (PET-CT) and it’s private.
He, however, queried: “How much does it cost to put a which with N1b can be procured, Nigeria doesn’t have the money to procure even one but a private hospital did.
“It is our duty to check the state and status of the equipment, the operations, the services rendered by the facility, status of the personnel.
“We also have to ensure the quality of the personnel and we find out that most of the hospitals don’t even have qualified personnel with no correct equipment among other defects but then it is our agency they will accuse of not giving license.
“So how do we treat cancer with this kind of equipment with 200 million people? It is not possible.
“We have a situation in the country, we have gazetted regulations and procedures including licensed experts on how to go about it, yet we are not doing it.”
In his address, the Minister of State for Health and Social Welfare, Dr. Tunji Alausa, disclosed that the Federal Government has mapped out plans to establish 6 cancer centers in the six geo-political parts of the country.
He noted that additional funds have been secured by the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led administration to facilitated the commencement of cancer related projects in the country.
This, according to him, is apart from the from N20 billion budget allocated for six cancer centres nationwide during the President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration which could not be accessed due to procurement related hurdles.
“So there is no way we could use the N20b to build the six cancer centres. So we have to make presentations to the National Assembly for additional budget allocation so that we can have enough funding to build the cancer centres.
“I’m happy to report today that we’ve got the additional funding and the groundbreaking six cancer centres will happen very soon”.
