admin
But her courageous decision will, we hope, remove some of the stigma that attaches itself to this last great group of medical killers and will help many to face facts while there is time.
Medical science has made incredible advances over the last two centuries, and especially in the last three quarters of a century.
It is difficult for most people alive now to imagine the “old” world when 10 percent of people died of smallpox, usually while they were children, when polio killed or crippled millions a year, when tuberculosis ravaged populations, killing many of the best, when every schoolchild would lose up to a year’s schooling over their school days from illness, when modest injuries or wounds were often lethal, and when doctors used to sit helpless working out when their patients would die.
Vaccination against the biggest child killers is now universal, and the worst disease, smallpox, has been eradicated. Polio is on its way to extinction, and yet in the last great Central African epidemic, just 56 years ago, vaccine was rationed to children under two; the vaccine was in very short supply, having only recently been passed for human use after a major discovery.
Penicillin and other antibiotics, which became available in World War II, only really reached the majority of the world’s population in cheap and readily available forms in the 1950s, and a whole range of illnesses and wounds suddenly became speedily treatable.
Now the pharmaceutical scientists are working on viruses.
The last big health scare, the last great pandemic, is HIV. Any visitor to a cemetery will find thousands of graves of young adults who died in the 1990s and early 2000s, from this killer.
Yet that disease, while not conquered, has been brought under control.
The ARV drugs, costing less than US$50 a month, have given life to millions around the world.
Strokes from high blood pressure were a killer, and there are cheap and effective drugs that allow millions to die of something else in old age.
We have now reached the stage when couples routinely expect all their children to live to adulthood, regardless of whether the family lives in the Developed World or the Developing World.
And yet even just a century ago that was not the case. Now we tend to worry more about bad drivers than bad germs.
Yet there is still one great set of illnesses where advance has been painfully slow. Cancers still kill millions.
In Zimbabwe, we see prominent people who have lived full lives, the late Vice President John Landa Nkomo, the late insurance leader Mr Paul Mukondo, succumbing.
One of the most influential and richest men in the world, Steve Jobs of Apple, died recently. Almost every family knows someone close who has died of cancer, often after a full life but there are young people who die of these conditions.
Yet we are not entirely helpless. Should a cancer be caught in the early stages, much can be done. There are many who have faced cancer and beaten cancer. And now, as Ms Jolie has shown, it is starting to be possible to work out the risks that a particular person may face and to reduce these risks before cancer even strikes.
In Zimbabwe, we need to work out ways to help people help themselves. For a start more people need to have more information of what to look for. A small cancer can be defeated.
Mr Jobs, despite all his billions, died because he started proper treatment too late.
Mr Mukondo only saw a doctor three weeks before his death, when there was nothing anyone could do. All those who have beaten cancer have beaten it because they were able to start treatment early enough.
Education then is a start. But we also need more access to screening, at fees that are affordable. We need to especially screen those at greater risk through their genetic inheritance.
Anyone who has had two of their grandparents die of cancer is potentially at greater risk than those whose grandparents died of something else. Ms Jolie was obviously able to go further, and was able to afford genetic screening.
But medical advances are so rapid that this might be available to almost all in a very few years. We need to remember that ARVs went from US$50 000 a year to well under US$400 a year within a decade.
Some screening is already done in Zimbabwe routinely, but as more routine tests become available we must be ready to implement them speedily. Cancer can be beaten.
Online Reporter