Playing with colours while drawing pictures is the only thing that brings joy to seven-year-old Afia Akhter these days.
The second-grader, who is suffering from blood cancer, largely spends her days lying in bed at a shelter home for child cancer patients in Dhaka nowadays.
Diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in September last year, she has been living in the shelter home for the last six months.
“Her hair and eyelashes are falling out day by day, but she never stops drawing – these colour pencils and her smile give me hope to fight against her cancer,” Afia’s mother Aysha Akhter Lovely said.
Afia, along with 19 other children diagnosed with cancer, is now undergoing treatment at Ashic Foundation, a 20-bed facility in Dhaka for cancer-affected children from rural areas.
Like Afia, a significant number of children are suffering from cancer in Bangladesh. Unlike her, though, most of these child patients cannot afford the treatment, which is quite expensive in the country.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), around 150,000 new patients are diagnosed with cancer in Bangladesh every year, of whom 20% are children.
Among these children, 90% are diagnosed at the late stages, according to the findings by WHO.
Dr Mafizur Rahman, associate professor in the department of radiation oncology at the National Institute of Cancer Research and Hospital (NICRH), said a lack of awareness about the disease was a major reason behind late diagnosis.
“If cancer can be diagnosed at an early stage, children can survive. But due to mostly their parents’ lack of awareness, most children come for diagnosis at the late stages, when chances of survival have already become slim,” he told Dhaka Tribune.
However, the survival rate of childhood cancer patients is higher compared to what it was 20 years ago, he added.
Second-hand smoking, pesticides and colour in food are major reasons behind cancer among children.
Another reason is parents administering medicine to their children for allergies or fever without consulting a doctor, said Dr Mafizur Rahman.
“Heavy use of medicines like paracetamol and Phenergan are also risky,” he further added.
Expensive, inadequate treatment facilities
Salma Choudhury, founder and chairperson of A Shelter for Helpless Ill Children (Ashic) Foundation, pointed out that not only was cancer treatment highly expensive in Bangladesh, but there was also a lack of proper treatment facilities.
“The minimum cost for treatment ranges between Tk5 lakh and Tk20 lakh, which most of the families of patients cannot afford,” she told Dhaka Tribune.
Courtesy: Dhaka Tribune. Written by: Nawaz Farhin Antara
For the full article, please visit: https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/2020/02/14/international-childhood-cancer-day-on-saturday-cancer-treatment-shockingly-inadequate-for-bangladeshi-children
