A massive screening campaign organised by National Committee for the Fight against cancer opened at the Baptiste d’Ekoumdoum hospital in Yaounde on January 23, 2023.
According to the World Health Organization, cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer affecting women worldwide. According to the same source, 604,000 women have been infected since 2020, compared to 342,000 deaths. Also, 90% of cases and deaths occurred in low- and middle-income countries.
In Cameroon, cervix cancer is the second gynecological cancer after breast cancer and the leading cause of cancer death as far as women are concerned. This alarming situation, therefore led the Ministry of Public Health through the National Committee for the Fight against Cancer (NCFC) to develop strategies to overcome this plague.
During the press conference on January 21, the leaders of this committee took the oath of raising women’s awareness of the curability of this disease, in the event of rapid screening, as noted by Penlap Yvette; community health expert at NCFC: “We are running campaigns regularly throughout the national territory, precisely during January, which is specially dedicated to the fight against this cancer. We insist a lot on primary and secondary prevention. Primary, in particular with the vaccine against HPV, which is the virus mainly responsible for cancer of the cervix, and secondary prevention, which concerns screening. We encourage women of childbearing age to get screened regularly, because this cancer is preventable, and can be prevented by screening, but can also be cured if screened early.”
It is in this context that the Cameroon Baptist Convention, a partner of the NCFC through its health unit, decided in its hospital center of Ekoumdoum to initiate a screening and awareness campaign from January 23. According to Mrs. Manjuh Florence, Vice-President of the African Organization for Research and Training of Cancer for Central Africa and Supervisor of the CBC Health Program, “This meeting is an opportunity for us to send a message. We can effectively fight cervical cancer. If we work together, we can make it happen and save lives.”
