Pune health officials and Tata Memorial Hospital plan to launch an ambitious Rs 1-crore project to conduct door-to-door screening of patients to detect cancer in rural areas. Officials will identify symptoms of oral, breast and cervical cancer, said district health officer Dr Dilip Mane. “We have prepared a checklist to help screen and identify the initial symptoms of cancer. These lists will be given to Accredited Social Health Activist (ASHA) workers. If ASHA ticks over four to five points on the checklist, then the person will be considered a high risk patient,” said Dr Mane.
The rural area around Pune is home to at least 40 lakh people, and according to health officials, at least 16 lakh include men and women over 30 years of age. “We will be using Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA) cryotherapy as part of the detection of cervical cancer programme. A 10-day training will be imparted by experts at Tata Memorial Hospital so that ASHA workers can understand the protocol to identify patients with cancer symptoms,” said Mane.
To ensure that each case of cancer is reported, Decimate C, an organisation that includes medical and surgical oncologists, is conducting several awareness programmes and will work with the government to register each new cancer patient. Dr Anant Bhushan Ranade, founder of Decimate C and former President of the Indian Cancer Society, said breast cancer was the most common cancer in the country today.
“At least 10 official registries have recorded data from hospitals that breast cancer is the most common cancer. In Pune alone, 20 per cent of women have cancer. What is of concern is that women are still detected at Stage 4 and therefore, awareness needs to be stepped up,” said Ranade. As part of the National Cancer Registry Programme, medical social workers collect data from hospitals. But the numbers are few and there is a lack of clarity on the growing burden of this disease. To give an accurate picture of the number of cancer cases in Pune, Dr Ranade has urged the government to ensure that each case is registered so that a proper database is generated.
When contacted, Dr A Nandakumar, former head of the National Cancer Registry Programme, Indian Council of Medical Research, told The Indian Express that projections on cancer burden help in planning cancer services which could range from primary prevention, early detection, diagnostic and treatment facilities. The National Cancer Registry Programme estimates that by 2020, the burden of cancer is likely to be 17.35 lakh new cases with almost an equal number of men and women, he said.