Hard questions on the cancer scourge

A sign indicating that smoking is prohibited. Cigarette smoking exposes users to cancer. FILE PHOTO

What you need to know:

  • There is still a lot of darkness around this disease yet cancer is killing millions annually and draining family savings.
  • Scientists agree that there are environmental carcinogens that can be controlled to reduce cancer prevalence.

As I write this, I am sure almost every Kenyan has encountered a bad news experience with cancer.

Just last week, we buried Baby Blessings. She had only celebrated her first birthday when the malady came knocking.

I had gone to visit her in Ward 3A, on the third floor, at the Kenyatta National Hospital, Nairobi.

The sight of some beautiful young angels struggling with excruciating pain at a time when they should have been playing broke my heart, and I cried later in hiding.

That those small bodies have to endure chemotherapy should awaken us to take some decisive action either individually or collectively.

CHOLERA

I recall a story I read long ago while studying veterinary medicine at the University of Nairobi.

It went like this:

Between 1832 and 1854, London had suffered two cholera epidemics that claimed tens of thousands of lives.

Cholera had already killed thousands in India, Russia, and the Middle East and probably in Africa, who knows?

As people were dying in London, a young vegetarian, teetotaller and bachelor doctor called John Snow closely followed the epidemic, and it disturbed him.

WASTE DISPOSAL

Then, not much was known about cholera. It was widely speculated that it was caused by miasma – bad air that contained poisonous vapour.

In my Lung’anyiro Village in Kakamega County, we still refer to diseases as muyaka (wind) and our neighbours in Nyanza also call it yamo (wind).

This myth was buoyed by the fact that London and many other feudal cities had poor waste disposal systems and human waste was found all over.

That cholera was especially prevalent in the poor neighbourhoods supported the “bad wind” theory in the medieval medical community.

Cholera was treated using rudimentary and painful procedures such as bleeding or swallowing vinegar – that didn’t work and people died like flies.

WATERBORNE
Dr Snow went against the grain. He discarded the long-held miasma theory, arguing that cholera was water- and not air-borne as was initially thought.

He mapped the deaths in relation to their water sources and pinpointed one of the public wells as the source of sickness due to pollution.

With some difficulty, he managed to persuade the town authorities to dismantle that well pump’s handle to stop people from drinking water from it and a drastic reduction in cholera cases was reported.

He became the first medic to document that cholera was a waterborne disease and could be controlled by simply curbing pollution through a proper sewerage system.

The policy makers adopted his discovery and implemented it.

PANDEMIC

Water engineers came up with designs that minimised contamination, and with that London bade farewell to cholera, effectively burying it in history books.

Dr Snow’s work gave birth to germ theory and epidemiology - the study of diseases in populations, their incidence, distribution, control and other health determinants in populations.

His story ties in with the cancer pandemic we are facing today.

There is still a lot of darkness around this disease yet cancer is killing millions annually and draining family savings.

Just like cholera in the 19th century, so has research been done on cancer in the 21st century.

POLLUTION
The Lancet journal has a dedicated a publication – The Lancet Oncology – to it, though it is a shame one has to pay to access it.

But I am convinced and I can bet with a piece of my liver that there is something in our environment that is equivalent to London’s “polluted well”.

It is either in the food we eat, the cosmetics we apply, the air we breathe or the water we drink.

We all know that tobacco smoking, both first and second hand, is a predisposing behaviour, but who cares?

Our industries still use benzene in the manufacture of plastics, rubber, lubricants and detergents oblivious of the carcinogenic effect on the populations.

CARCINOGENS

The International Agency for Research on Cancer recently listed Glyphosate – a major ingredient in herbicides and desiccant in grains as being probably carcinogenic, yet tonnes of it are still being manufactured and spilled on millions of acres globally.

We still have asbestos on our roofs, even with their confirmed carcinogenic properties.

Although scientists agree that there are environmental carcinogens that can be controlled to reduce cancer prevalence, we are yet to see a Dr Snow with the passion to push the authorities to break the handle of the “polluted well” that is at the root cause of cancer.

Dr Othieno is a Nairobi-based veterinary expert. [email protected]