December 2018
Dear Friend,
When people think of health problems in Africa, they often focus on the common ones—malaria, HIV, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases. Most of the effort is rightly geared toward combating these illnesses by ensuring that medicines and vaccines are available.
However, non-infectious illnesses (known as non-communicable diseases, or NCDs) make up a significant proportion of the global disease burden and include conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancers, and diabetes. Worldwide, 71% of deaths are due to NCDs, and 75% of those deaths are in low- and middle-income countries such as Sudan.
Here in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, we seem to have an inordinately high number of cancer patients with a wide variety of types. In children, we have patients with leukemias, lymphomas, and bone cancers. Adults have cancers of the cervix, uterus, skin, prostate, bone, liver, lung, and soft tissue, in addition to leukemias, lymphomas, and nasopharyngeal (nose and throat) carcinomas.
The Gidel Mother of Mercy Hospital is the only facility providing cancer treatment for literally a thousand miles. We treat nearly all these patients with some combination of chemotherapy. Many children with Burkitt's lymphoma get a complete cure with chemotherapy. For those who present with advanced, inoperable liver or cervical cancer, we can only offer palliative care.
You'll be moved by the story of Zainab, a 13-year-old girl with a disfiguring facial tumor that had been growing for months. She was so ashamed of her appearance that she walked around with a scarf covering her face. We took a needle biopsy of the tumor and waited a couple of months for the result as the tumor continued to grow. The result came back as a small round blue cell tumor—a rare tumor with some similarities to the more common Ewing's sarcoma. We started chemotherapy and got dramatic results—not likely to be a cure but at least Zainab can go outside without covering herself. For a couple hundred dollars, we have extended her life and significantly improved her social situation.
