THE WAG: Malaria and pneumonia are more pressing concerns than cancer

The panic over what is in our sukuma wiki and the increasing rate of this disease are often wrong and misleading — it is not caused by increased pesticide use

Another entry into the folder marked, “We are all going to die.” Our food is tainted by pesticides and heavy metals. Yet another study has told us that. Kenya’s food supply is mainly met by smallholders who are lax on standards, which has injected our sukuma wiki with lead.

The immediate reaction to this news is to link this increase in tainted food to the much lamented “increase” in the national cancer rate. Enjoy your lunch but remember your mama mboga is slowly giving you tumours.

Last year it was also revealed that the rate of cancer in the country was outpacing population growth and will double in 11 years.

I say that the panic over what is in our sukuma and the increasing rate of cancer are often wrong and misleading.

Firstly, there are no reliable figures on deaths in the country. The latest KNBS figures on mortality in the Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, 2014, warn that numbers are estimates.

If the main figures on mortality in the country are approximations, then you know that a subset of the figures, for instance deaths from cancer, are extremely unreliable. The truth is that we do not have a clear picture of the cancer burden we face.

The next truth is that even with those dodgy figures bandied about, if you were to take into account the actual numbers of different age groups, the rate of cancer in the population is actually falling, not rising.

PESTICIDES MY FOOT!

More importantly the idea that cancer is caused by increased pesticide use has been steadily debunked. You only need look at other countries. The American public has increasingly became exposed to carcinogens in the environment, and yet the cancer rate went down.

Several scientists had predicted in the 1960s that American life expectancy would plummet from 70 to 40 in the year 2000 due to an increase in pesticide use. This did not happen.

We can therefore safely conclude that whatever nasties are in sukuma  won’t immediately land you in the oncology department.

Things are actually getting better on the health sector. The death rate has more than halved since the year 2000 despite the attendant population growth.

Malaria and pneumonia are the biggest cause of death in the country. Cancer is reckoned to be the third on the list.

As time goes by, cancer will race to the top of the list because the population will be older. All rich countries who have eliminated war, abject poverty and cholera have their citizens’ die of cancer. It is a disease of the later ages, a disease that in its own way is a symbol of a successful health system.

Cancer’s growing dominance of the global mortality tables is not because the disease is getting worse or because our environment is more polluted, but because people are avoiding other causes of death and living longer.

The average media consumer thinks the cancer rate is rising, which forces the government to divert funding from more deserving disease to address this made up epidemic.

For example, not every county should have an oncology department because that would be wasteful.

Cancer afflicts us in later ages, and the overwhelming majority of Kenyans do not currently fall within its space.

We should worry more about malaria

Consider Malaria: It is the number one killer in Kenya. Seventy per cent of the population is at risk of infection where they live. It kills a lot faster than cancer. We have also known the cure and cause of malaria for 200 years now.

Now consider cancer: It is now 40 years since American President Richard Nixon declared war on it, and still the world is nowhere near a cure.

It will not be defeated any time soon - perhaps not in our lifetimes - because our cells are dividing as we speak. This is a disease caused by an inbuilt flaw in our evolution. Because it is caused by errors in cell replication that accumulate with time, it means that even if we all lived very healthily, ran the Nairobi Marathon, did not smoke and became vegans, many of us would still die of cancer due to age.

So why is it that the oncology machine in KNH breaking front page news? Why is it that cancer gobbles up so many minutes of headline agonising when a fifth of the population is below the age of 20 and only about 10 per cent of the population is above 49?

The tragedy is that 200 years after finding the cure for malaria, people are still dying. We have had antibiotics that can cure pneumonia, our second highest killer for a century.

Part of the problem is that richer and older people are the ones who die from cancer. They are able to disproportionately voice concern over a disease that is not yet a concern for the majority.

Surely, the fact that five year olds die of malaria is a more pressing concern than cancer. We can do something about malaria, cancer is not yet a priority. It is very hard to make sure that no one dies of malaria, but it is possible. Cracking the big “C” is a lot harder.

Our goal should be first to dedicate public health towards the targets we can achieve. After we deal with malaria, which is difficult, we can begin tackling the impossible. Right now, what we need to do is to make cancer the number one killer in the country by eliminating malaria and pneumonia.