Cervical cancer vaccine hope for African women

By Katrina Manson

DAR ES SALAAM (Reuters) - So crammed is Tanzania's only cancer treatment center that Rukia Kondogoza, wrapped in bright kanga cloth, has to share her bed with another patient.

A farmer from the rural south of the country, the 40-year-old has cervical cancer -- the biggest cause of female cancer deaths on the continent and a disease that kills one African woman every 10 minutes.

Of the 500,000 women worldwide who are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year, 80 percent are in the developing world and 71,000 of them are in Africa, according to the African Organization for Research and Training in Cancer.

"This cancer disease is worse than malaria because of all the heavy bleeding," said Kondogoza, who is one of 7,500 new cases recorded in Tanzania each year.

"When the doctor brought the news I just accepted it. I knew I could not ignore it because it is there in my body."

Many others do ignore it, however.

The ministry for health and social welfare says only 10 percent of cases ever reach the country's only cancer center, the Ocean Road Cancer Institute, for treatment.

Even so, the institute housed in a 19th century German colonial building with four wards and up to 200 in-patients at a time, is badly overstretched. Patients and relatives crowd the grounds, lying on the dirt outside.

"Right now we have 46 in-patients but only 28 beds," said nurse Felister Massawe of Kondogoza's ward.

"The patients are many but the beds are few, so some of them have to stay two to one bed."

LATE DIAGNOSES

Caused by a virus that is passed through sexual contact -- the human papillomavirus (HPV) -- some 200 million African women are at risk from the disease. Condoms do not help because it is transferred via skin contact, not bodily fluid.

By the time symptoms emerge, such as bleeding after intercourse, it is often too late. Tanzania's Ministry of Health and Social Welfare says most come to the center only once the disease has reached its later stages, making it harder to treat.

Of those who develop the disease, 78 percent of all cases in Africa result in death -- much higher than in the West where screening programs have encouraged early detection of the illness, which can take 20 years to develop.

"For each of the mothers that dies, she leaves behind three to five children when she dies, adding to the orphan situation," Professor Isaac Adewole, chairman of the sub-Saharan Africa Cervical Cancer Working Group, told Reuters.