No reliable data on cancer in AP, Telangana

No reliable data on cancer in AP, Telangana

While an estimated 65,000 to 70,000 new cancer cases are reportedly being added every year in the country, finding credible data on the number of cases in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh seems to be an exercise in futility. This, as the Indian Council of Medical Research has kept away its centrally-funded Population Based Cancer Registry (PBCR) programme from the undivided state for more than two decades.

There are now 25 cities and towns in the country where the ICMR conducts its PBCR programme. Only four cities in the south have found a place in this list ? Chennai, Bangalore (since 1981 in both states), Thiruvananthapuram and Kollam (since 2006). The ICMR provides accurate data on the disease by keeping tabs on all cancer hospitals through these 25 PBCR centres.

Post bifurcation, oncologists now rue that both the new states do not have a single designated PBCR town or city, thereby making it difficult to assess the magnitude of the spread of cancer. "Looking at the rate of cancer incidence in Telangana and AP, there is an urgent need for the PBCR programme, so that it can pool data from corporate and state cancer centres to evaluate the disease burden and prevalence of specific type of cancers," said Dr P Raghuram, president elect, Association of Breast Surgeons of India.

He also made a strong case for cancer to be made a ?notifiable disease', adding that in the absence of a centralized cancer registry, policy makers and experts can only bank on conjectures and hearsay data.

For instance, at the ongoing week-long oral cancer check-up camps at Basavatarakam Indo-American Cancer Hospital and Research Institute (BIACHRI) and MNJ Institute of Oncology, 15 cases of oral cancer were indentified from among 180 suspects within just three days. "We recorded 1.41 lakh cancer patients in the last 13 years of BIACHRI's existence since 2002, but this data cannot be relied upon for a true picture of a particular type of cancer as there are many cancer hospitals and patients keep changing them often," explained Dr MVT Krishna Mohan, consultant oncologist.

Same is the case at the state-run MNJ Institute of Oncology, where records show 50,000 registered cases since its inception, with the addition of 12,000 new cases every year. Speaking to TOI, Dr C Sai Ram, senior oncologist at the institute, said that a designated cancer registry for Hyderabad is on the cards as a proposal has recently been put up by ICMR to include the city under the PBCR programme in its XII Plan.