Editorial Comment: We need to pay more attention to cancer prevention

Cancer, or more precisely a range of cancers, are becoming more common as a cause of death in Zimbabwe, often because people are not dying sooner of the illnesses driven by poverty and often because they are not seeking in time the tests and treatment that can extend lives.

This month is breast cancer awareness month, and The Herald along with other Zimpapers titles plays its part in increasing that awareness.

But those dealing with cancer like to stress the need for everyone to take a range of cancers more seriously, and importantly look at the simple tests and lifestyle changes that can make so much difference in both prevention and early treatment.

While children and young people do succumb to cancer and do need to be aware of the dangers and the need for early diagnosis, cancer in these age groups is a lot rarer than among the middle-aged and elderly. But in all cases, the medical specialists continually stress the need for early diagnosis.

All cancers are abnormal cell growth, starting with a single cell in almost every case and then growing and spreading. An early diagnosis when the abnormal growth is still tiny means that the chances of killing off the cancer by a variety of methods are much enhanced, and fatalities consequently reduced.

This is one reason why so much attention is paid to the most common cancers, cervical cancer and breast cancer in women and prostate cancer in men, where there are simple tests and where treatment in the very early stages is often not very complicated and recovery rates are reasonably high.

There are a wide range of ways people can reduce their risk of cancer, just as there are a wide range of lifestyle choices that can increase the risk.

Around the world tobacco smoking is still the high risk activity.

In Zimbabwe tobacco-induced cancer is less common, as so many people do not smoke and have never smoked and with very strong regulations preventing smoking in public areas, so passive smoking is not a problem either. But smokers have the same sort of risk in Harare as anywhere else.

Around the world a lot of cancers arise from other unwise lifestyle choices, such as obesity from over eating, excessive alcohol and other dubious choices. We are seeing increasing numbers of these sort of cases in Zimbabwe as more people can afford to live unwisely, the dangers of prosperity rather than poverty.

There is, at the moment, far less of the pressure to change lifestyles than there was to stop smoking, or at least to stop smoking where other people could be affected. But this sort of pressure could well be needed.

There are a lot of non-cancerous non-infectious diseases caused by the same unwise lifestyle choices, and sensible eating and reasonable exercise can reduce hypertension, risk of heart disease, risk of diabetes and many other conditions. Again the wiser lifestyle choices do not eliminate any of the these conditions, but they do reduce the risks and so are worth pushing.

A number of infections can make particular cancers more common, with quite a large block of our cervical cancer cases arising from infection with a particular virus. However, here there is a vaccine, and a lot of school girls are now routinely vaccinated. The vaccination needs to be done when the girl or woman is young.

While we still have to cope with the large number of women who had passed the required maximum age by the time the vaccine became available and the programme started, in time the number of cases of cervical cancer will fall, although not to zero as there are cases not triggered by that particular virus. But a large block of the largest group of female cancer deaths will be eliminated, and so the programme is essential.

Combating cancer is not a single process involving a single route. There are so many factors that increase or reduce risk, and there are so many different types of cancer, that everyone needs to act sensibly and follow proper advice.

Death rates are rising, but five years ago in 2019, the latest year for the breakdown, there were still only 2 416 cancer deaths in Harare, Chitungwiza and Bulawayo, the largest urban centres, so while not the biggest killer, it was one of the more important killers. The tragedy is that a fairly large block of the cancers that eventually killed a patient were easy to diagnose and reasonably easy to treat in the early stages. So a good block of those deaths were preventable.

The rising prosperity in Zimbabwe, and the rising quality of health services, are both likely to make cancer more common, the better health services meaning that fewer people die of other conditions before they contract cancer. Greater life expectancies do change the sort of things people eventually die from.

This is why we need to treat cancer in the same way as other potentially serious ailments and often generated by lifestyle choices. But these days people take their hypertension tablets, they sort out their diabetes, they even take their ARV medication for HIV, and in the same way they need to be sensible about testing for cancers.