No cancer machine working in Nigeria—Health Minister

Nigeria’s minister of health, Professor Isaac Adewole, speaks on various efforts by his ministry to improve health care delivery. He was interviewed by NAN editor-in-chief, Lawal Ado. .

While speaking on cancer, he said: “Much more important also in our 2017 budget we want to upgrade seven more centres for the treatment of cancer. As we are talking today, there is no public hospital in Nigeria that has cancer treatment machine that is working.

Ideally we need one machine per one million people. Going by that, Nigeria should have about 200 cancer treatment machines. We have 7 but none of the seven machines is working today.

But in the 2017 budget, we will ensure that each of the seven centres has two machines which means one will be a backup. We will upgrade Maiduguri, Zaria, Ilorin, the National Hospital, Abuja, Ibadan, Benin and Enugu in the first phase.

We are likely to get a private sector organisation to help with the National Hospital; in fact we may sign the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) this month. If we take National Hospital out, we will go to Sokoto. Gombe is waiting. Jos will be in the second round.

I got a grant some years back to set up six centres of excellence. I put one in Jos, and I can tell you that Jos is one of the best. They have done better than Ibadan. The government is committed to making sure that we have the facilities to handle cancer cases.”