CANCER INFORMATION IN UGANDA.
The typical cancer patient in Uganda normally has the following characteristics:
1. The disease is advanced or has fatally progressed, due to general ignorance about the need to treat cancer early and the country’s significant lack of diagnostic and treatment facilities.
2. Treatment, in the form of chemotherapy, radiotherapy and drugs, is prohibitively expensive, even for the well-to-do. In Uganda, where many cancer patients are from rural, low-income families, the disease is usually a death sentence. Most specialist treatment is concentrated in the capital, Kampala, which is difficult for the majority of rural, low income families to access.
3. Those who finally arrive in the centres from remote rural areas take residence and congest specialist wards for many months. Thus, the precious, few facilities become dangerously overcrowded.