Africa-Press – Cape verde. The National Coordinator of the Oncological Disease Prevention Program acknowledged that Cape Verde currently has better conditions for diagnosing cancer, but advocates for more budgetary resources aimed at improving both diagnosis and treatment.
Carla Barbosa was speaking to the press as part of the Pink October and Blue November March held today by the Cape Verdean Association for the Fight against Cancer (ACLCC) in partnership with the Cape Verdean Olympic Committee.
She considered that the country has given many priorities to the diagnosis and treatment of cancer as a way of being able to organize the response very well in order to then be able to massify screening.
“Cape Verde has placed great importance on knowing its data, in this sense, in 2022 it implemented the oncological cancer registry, a registry that already provides us with the data we need to understand in relation to the incidence and prevalence of the most frequent cancers”, she revealed, stating that this allows for more targeted strategies to be drawn up in the fight against cancer.
She acknowledged that nowadays in Cape Verde there are better conditions for diagnosing most of the most common cancers, such as breast, prostate, cervical and stomach cancer.
With many challenges still to be faced, as it is an archipelago country, she stated that access to these diagnoses and treatments is still very much at the central level of the Agostinho Neto University Hospital, in Praia.
“And in this sense, there is also the proposal to create the Baptista de Sousa Oncology Center (in São Vicente) to increase access to people in the north of the country as well”, she recalled.
Meanwhile, Carla Barbosa appealed for people to be aware and conscious of their lifestyle, stressing that as everyone already knows, many risk factors related to cancer are related to lifestyle.
“So, I think that the general population should take into account its role in their lives, in their self-care, and take into account the exams that should be done routinely”, she recommended.
On the other hand, she argued that at an institutional level, it is necessary to improve diagnostic work conditions, for which more budgetary resources and human resources need to be allocated, given that cancer is a disease that tends to increase more and more.
“We already have more resources when compared to previous years, but more is needed because, as we are seeing, cancer is also increasing and there are resources that we do not yet have, such as radiotherapy”, she explained.
For this official, it is “important” for Cape Verde to have access to all treatments, that is, surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, molecular therapy, among others, in order to be able to carry out the treatment in its entirety and thus minimize the suffering of evacuations.
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