With the billion plus population, India is one of the
youngest country in the world with 65% population in the working age. However,
this promising population dividend is also suffering from malignant life style
related health issues which is silently hollowing the India’s pillar of
strength, it young people. The diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular problems
and lately cancer has started appearing in the young men and women of this
country as early as in late thirties or early forties.
Surprisingly, the cancer has become a significant menace and
concern of personal, social and economic life of our people and severely
impacting the socio-economic scenario of India. According to a study, in 2004
total cancer patients were over eight lacs, which in 2014, just after a decade,
has more than doubled to 18 lacs. Every year a million (10 lacs) people are
being diagnosed with cancer and nearly 6-7 lacs die of it annually, while the
number of oncologists and specialists to treat these patients has not increased
as much in these years.
According to an estimate an average cancer therapy for an
individual with lung cancer comes around Rs. 6.5 lacs which is much more than
average income (Rs. 5 Lacs) of middle class family. One can imagine how a poor
family would remain untreated and left to die an untimely death. Thousands of
the patients who receive the costly therapy are pushed deep into poverty.
What can be done?
The individual effort to stay healthy is necessary to beat
the menace of cancer and live cancer free. The balanced and simple diet, active
life style, daily exercise, routine check-up to catch the disease early are a
few step an individual can adopt in order to lead a healthy life.
To increase the awareness of the cancer disease the
government and private corporates under their social responsibility should run
awareness campaign about the cancer using the social media, television and
print media to have wide reach. The campaign may include awareness for early
diagnosis, annual check-ups of the prone people such as 40 year plus
individuals or those having the disease in close family, promoting healthy life
style, especially in urban areas.
The state governments should provide for a clear policy for
the patient’s treatment and cap the cost of cancer treatment so that private
hospitals or care providers do not charge the patients unreasonable and
catastrophic amounts for the treatments including the surgery, chemotherapy,
radiotherapy or palliative care. The cost of treatment needs to be made
realistic and affordable for the average citizen. Privately funded health insurance or publicly funded
health initiatives help the people in western country to meet the excessive
treatments cost, while in India insurance remains limited to middle class or
upper middle class families, that most of the times not realistic to meet the
cost of cancer treatments. The government initiative and funding is meagre and
the majority of the people remain unaware of such schemes. Efforts and policy
are urgently needed to plug these gaps so that cancer care become economically
accessible.
Enhancing the infrastructure and ensuring the availability
of specialist doctors is major bottleneck in the current cancer treatments. A
country of 1.25 billion population has only 27 dedicated cancer hospitals and
only 1000 trained cancer specialists. These numbers suggest that situation is
really serious. Sample this, India has one oncologist for nearly 2000 cancer
patients while the USA has one doctor for every 100 patients. Therefore, a
policy should be adopted to open more speciality care centres in the area where
cancer incidence is more such as in the north-eastern states, West Bengal,
Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and some areas of Punjab.
