Breast cancer is a neglected disease in Mozambique

By: Mercedes Sayagues | 12/31/2010

Editors Note: Mercedes Sayagues discussing breast cancer and hospital/patient awareness.

For a change, I am happy to be queuing at the photocopying shop.

I could queue the whole day, for the shop is air-conditioned on this Hot-Sticky-Maputo-Summer Day with 36 degrees Celsius and 200% humidity.

I read a magazine, my pile of clippings on the counter. On top, last week’s story about breast cancer.

People here know little about breast cancer. HIV/AIDS, TB, malaria and cholera get the lion’ s share of attention, information and money.

Breast cancer is so under-resourced that only in 2009 the public health service acquired three mammograms machines, one for each regional hospital in the South, Central and Northern regions. Three, when the population is 21 million.

When women get to a doctor, frequently it is too late. The cancer is at terminal stage. Those with a chance of cure must come to the capital, Maputo, for treatment. This means chemotherapy or a mastectomy, but not radiotherapy. Patients with means travel to neighbouring South Africa for life-prolonging radiotherapy. The poor have to do without.

Don’t waste time

The Savana story had this information, and the life story of Lourdes Ferrao, who is in remission after two operations, and Marcelina, who is terminal and wanted to remain anonymous. Marcelina implores women not to waste precious time at a traditional healer but to go to hospital as soon as they feel a lump. She didn’t and is now dying at Maputo Central Hospital.

A woman in the queue picks up the clipping. “I love reading people stories,” she says. “May I?”

“This is so interesting,” she adds. She did not know that Maputo Central Hospital gives free mammograms. ”Neither did I,” chips in another woman. Soon every woman in the queue is reading.

I order photocopies of the story for everyone.

Something similar happened in the newsroom as we developed the story. I sit in the office with the two women marketing officers. They requested mammograms from their doctors. The intern writing the story, Olivia Mapute, 32, three children, had her first ever breast examination at a health fair organized by the fledgling Mozambican Association against Cancer. (www.alccmocambique@gmail.com)

After publication, a male colleague dropped by my desk. “Thanks for publishing useful information that we did not know about,” he said.

A debate around pics

We had a lively debate in the newsroom about the photographs. At the hospital, photographer Joel Chiziane took two dramatic pictures of breast with invasive cancer. One looked like a nightmarish, horrid flower or mushroom. The other was a deformed breast covered in bandages. Which one, if any, to publish?

Some said the most shocking, to stir people into action. Others said the bandaged one, less shocking, but a warning nonetheless.

A Savana stringer, herself freshly out chemotherapy for breast cancer, strongly argued against the diseased breasts. “To send a message of hope, don’t scare women, otherwise they will not go to the doctor,“ she argued. “And I refuse to be identified with deformed, purulent breasts.”

At layout time, we dropped the diseased breasts for a suggestive pic of silhouetted women profiles.

Check out the slide show. What would you have done? Which pics would you use?

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