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Lessons From Africa
Two advocates bring back cancer awareness messages from their visits abroad
Two patient advocates recently traveled to Africa to learn more about cancer awareness, research and outreach efforts on the continent. Below, they share their experiences from their trips and what they learned.
A Public Health Challenge, An Advocacy Opportunity
By Mary Jackson Scroggins
Last October, I traveled more than 8,000 miles and nearly 24 hours to help place cancer on the priority list of public health issues in Africa. Taking on the same challenge were 400 cancer researchers and others—the majority of them from African countries. Our destination was the sixth international conference of the African Organisation for Research and Training in Cancer (AORTIC), held Oct. 24 to 28, 2007, in Cape Town, South Africa. The event, “Cancer in Africa: Challenges and Opportunities,” was a call to action in the continent’s fight against cancer.
As an African-American ovarian cancer survivor and a health advocate who cares deeply about world health issues, and who feels a particular connection to all of Africa, I came to the conference hoping to assist in developing a more robust advocacy network throughout the continent. I also wanted to investigate Africa’s cancer research efforts and survivor advocacy movement.
Arriving in the Johannesburg airport just after my connecting flight to Cape Town had departed, I received my first sample of hospitality South-African style. A young blue-uniformed airport employee with a familiar-feeling smile came to my assistance when my suitcase fell from a conveyor belt. He escorted me through customs, through the ticket-exchange process, and to my new flight, refusing to accept payment. Without this unsolicited, much-appreciated assistance, I would have missed the last flight to Cape Town and the young man’s minibriefing on class structure in post-apartheid South Africa.
This graciousness persisted throughout my stay, which included a welcoming convergence of individuals who were profoundly concerned about the present burden of cancer in Africa. The conference attendees were even more focused, however, on the devastation projected in developing countries in the years to come. Many speakers framed their presentations with a warning from the preamble to the 2006 World Cancer Declaration: “By 2020, more than 16 million new cancer cases and 10 million cancer deaths are expected annually. Seventy percent of these deaths will likely occur in developing countries that are unprepared to address their growing cancer burden.”
The conference agenda spanned a wide variety of topics and showcased talks about treatment in low-resource settings, palliative care, the inadequacy of cancer education, the inaccessibility of cancer drugs, tobacco-control efforts, and programs that help patients obtain needed cancer drugs and care. The meeting also included a jubilant celebration of AORTIC’s 25th anniversary. And, although survivor advocacy was not an area of special emphasis at the meeting, a well-attended session addressed the continental potential for patient advocacy efforts in Africa.
Breaks and collegial lunches provided welcome relief from the gravity of the conference’s subject and especially from the bleak projections for Africa’s already increasing cancer rates—predictions that will only be mitigated by swift action from an international partnership of researchers, public health officials, health professionals, advocates and the public. A gregarious Cameroonian researcher, whom I’d met at the airport in Cape Town, fixed a small plate of food for me each day, having noticed that I was talking more than eating, and admonished, “Eat, my dear friend, now.” There was such a strong sense of camaraderie and connection throughout the conference that this presumption made sense.