Expectations of improved cancer care and treatment are high with the first ever state of the art National Cancer Center in Lilongwe expected to become fully operational before the end of this year complete with radiotherapy services.

The development comes against a background of 3000 cases recorded annually, against one specialist doctor in Malawi which is described as a huge disease burden by health experts.

Close to 70 percent of cancer cases are women as compared to men with cervical cancer being the leading one in the country and contributing to 30 percent of all the cancers.

Kaposi’s sarcoma used to be the leading cancer but with the scale up of Anti-Retroviral therapy (ART), it is falling down quickly due to adherence and adequate follow-up of patients.

One of the country’s leading and dedicated oncologist Dr. Leo Masamba underscored the need for a proper system to run a Cancer centre through a comprehensive programme such as the National Cancer Institute to care take logistics of patient’s movement from one district to another

Speaking exclusively to Nthanda Times on the sidelines of the recent 6th Cancer symposium, he however noted that long term, Malawi needs to build more cancer centres; regional centres so that people in the north, east and southern regions are able to access radiotherapy and cancer care.

The specialist explained that as it is, the arrangement would actually exclude a lot more Malawians as they may not be in a position to get to the Centre.

Dr. Masamba indicated that for the country to run one Cancer centre, there is need for government to provide a deliberate accommodation services for patients that are coming from far; which could be done as hostels where patients that are coming from far could reside whilst receiving their radiotherapy treatment.

He hinted that all this requires proper coordination from the Cancer hospital and the people that are assisting to run it.

“Running a radiotherapy facility is a very complicated task; so a radiotherapy facility doesn’t run the way we run our normal hospitals because it demands a lot of engineering services, you have to have different procurement systems, it requires a lot of quality assurance; a lot of physics and then you have to doctors that are specifically trained to treat with radiotherapy.

“If you approach it as an ordinary hospital, most of the times the mistake that people do in Africa is to affiliate such kind of a facility to a hospital like a department, you will fail. You’re going to close those machines within a very short time.

“You need to set up a dedicated system to run a Cancer centre because it’s a very complex institution because of the nature of the equipment and the nature of the facility”

A clinical lead for Medicine Department at the Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital, Masamba is credited for the establishment of the Oncology Unit in 2010 initially the only cancer centre facility in Malawi stationed in Ward 2a.