Desperate sufferers have sold their land, cattle to get cured

As advocates of early cancer treatment pat themselves on the back on increasing awareness about the disease, many of the patients who have responded to the call are ending up not getting the treatment.

The high cost of treatment is making patients fail to start treatment once diagnosed with the disease or to drop out while on treatment.

Take the case of Perus Nuna, who is fighting breast cancer that has now spread to other parts of her body. The initial phases of the treatment has left her penniless and at the mercy of well-wishers to finance the remaining treatment courses.

Statistics indicate that in Kenya, more than 18,000 people die of cancer-related complications every year, with the cost of treatment being highlighted as one of the contributing factors to this high death rate. 

Curable cancers turn into incurable ones as costs hold back patients from initiating treatment during the disease’s early stages of development.

Attack critical body organs

Globally, studies show that cancer kills more than seven million people annually, 70 per cent of these deaths occurring in low and middle income countries where the majority of poor people are found and health facilities are in a dysfunctional state.

In Kenya, it is this cost that is forcing patients to delay initiating treatment, allowing the disease to spread and attack critical organs of the body, thus increasing their probability of dying.

Even those who are lucky to commence treatment find it difficult to complete their sessions.

They only manage to struggle through the first line phase and then get stuck when they are required to transit to the second line treatment. This is where doctors are witnessing patients dropping out from the treatment programme.

“A majority of our patients starts wavering when it gets to second line treatment. They just disappear, and when they re-emerge, the situation is not good at all,” says Dr Irene Weru, a pharmacist at Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH).

The situation worsens if the required drugs are not available at KNH, where they are offered at a subsidised cost, and patients have to buy them at high prices in private pharmacies. Only those who admitted are lucky as their second line treatment costs are met by the National Hospital and Insurance Fund (NHIF).

But there is a catch: while the fund pays only for in-patients, over 80 per cent of those on cancer treatment at KNH are outpatients.

Second line treatment for breast cancer, for instance, costs an average of Sh20,000 excluding screening and other attendant costs. In total, a patient with breast cancer needs about Sh70,000 to comfortably go through the various treatment phases offered at KNH.

What this means is that a breast cancer patient who is unable to afford the Sh4,300 required for first line drugs is very unlikely to go through the costly second line treatment process unless supported by the NHIF or well-wishers.

The situation gets more difficult and trickier for children with cancer, especially after their discharge from hospital.

After intensive chemotherapy treatment, these children go on a two-year maintenance programme during which they take a combination of drugs that prevent the cancer from recurring.

One of the key drugs in this combination that is taken daily for 24 months costs Sh180 a tablet. This comes to Sh129,600 for the two-year period that the child is on treatment.