It is no longer news that one of the health issues currently ravaging the country is cancer, which unfortunately kills 10 Nigerians per hour or 240 persons per day.
What seems to be the news, according to available statistics is that this figure will double in the nearest decade if nothing is done to reduce the disease which the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said was preventable.
While over two million Nigerians are living with one form of cancer or the other, a WHO report shows that well over 100,000 new cases of cancers are diagnosed yearly in Nigeria, out of which 80,000 of those affected die, especially from the commonest cancer types in the country due to lack of proper awareness on prevention or early detection, or lack of facilities for treatment.
For instance, if the data from the 2014 national cancer survey is to go by, it means breast cancer kills over 40 Nigerian women daily, prostate cancer kills at least 26 Nigerian men daily, while cervical cancer kills about 26 Nigerian women every day. Experts also believed these figures must have likely increased by the end of 2016.
Available information suggests that this figure will snowball into an uncontrollable health issue for the country within the next decade because of various identifiable factors which experts say must be looked at if the country must win the war against the disease.