As Nigeria and the rest of the world grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic, health experts and advocates say the virus has led to less attention being paid to other ailments such as cancer.
While cancer patients are disproportionally impacted by the COVID-19 partly because they are significantly more likely to die from the disease once infected, the greater risk is the altering of treatment regimens and cutting of funds, health experts say.
Treating cancer is expensive and for many years even before COVID-19, cancer patients and their families in Nigeria were left to pay with their life savings or sell properties as government assistance was barely in existence.
Cancer patients often relied on foreign aid and raising funds through social media, a situation health experts blamed on the country’s fragmented health insurance system, which does not cover key cancer treatment regimen.
Already acutely underfunded, cancer treatment was further relegated once the pandemic broke.
Cancer trust fund
Hope rose for cancer patients at the 2019 National Health Dialogue when the health minister, Osagie Ehanire announced a plan to institute a cancer treatment fund to reduce the financial burden of treating the terminal disease.
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