Meru cancer surge blamed on cereals

What you need to know:

  • Concerns over the number of youths below 30 years who are toothless.
  • One Igembe ward produces more patients as health boss calls for probe.

Poor post-harvest handling of cereals has partly been blamed for increased cancer cases in Meru County.

Health Executive William Muraah also raised the alarm over high cancer cases in one location in Igembe.

He said 15 per cent of patients seeking radiation therapy treatment at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi were from Meru.

Speaking to journalists at Meru Teaching and Referral Hospital (MTRH) on Tuesday, Dr Muraah said “there is an increase of cancer in Meru”.

“People used to die of cancer thinking they had been bewitched. The cancer is due to food people eat and exposure to chemicals,” Dr Muraah, who was accompanied by Health chief officer James Gitonga, said.

Speaking to journalists at the hospital on Tuesday, Dr Muraah said Imenti Central and Imenti South in Meru, there was an increase of liver cancer due to poor storage of cereals.

“Farmers who rely on irrigation usually rush to harvest their crops when the rains start and due to high moisture content, the cereals develop aflatoxin. Even if the grains with aflatoxin are given to livestock and you consume meat from that animal, you stand a risk of being infected,” Dr Muraah said.

He said the county government had also approached the Kenya Medical Research Institute to find out why one area in Igembe, Meru County had many cases of brain and throat cancer.

“We want to profile them and know if it is the men or women who are more affected and how to prevent the infection. We want to teach the locals how to farm. We have already started an education campaign,” Dr Muraah said.

He said the research will also seek to find out why more people under 30 years are toothless.

DIAGNOSTIC TOOL

Dr Muraah said the Meru government has acquired a Sh45 million computed tomography (CT) scan, a diagnostic tool used to detect cancer and find out the disease’s stage.

The county however has no linear accelerator machine to treat cancer but has equipment to determine whether a patient requires surgery or not. A cancer specialist also visits the county once a month to handle the patients who come from as far as Laikipia, Tharaka Nithi, Isiolo, Marsabit and Embu counties.

He said of the patients who visited MTRH, 15 of them were found to have cancer in the last one month.

He said the county government plans to build a Sh700 million theatre with an accelerator for cancer treatment.

Currently, KNH is the only public hospital with cancer treatment machines in the country.

Meanwhile, Dr Muraah added that MTRH generated Sh100 million in the past six months. He said the collections had dropped from Sh13 million to Sh4.5 million per month before new measures were put in place to curb loopholes.

Dr Muraah said the county government expects to be increase the revenue to at least Sh60 million monthly by end of 2016.