By Bruce Chooma, Ndola
The Times of Zambia (Ndola)
19 December 2007
WITH more than half of his face disfigured and one eye already popped out, Aaron Mwale painfully struggled to raise his bulgy head to have a glimpse of a high profile sympathiser who might well be the only hope left for him.
At six years, Aaron Mwale, a poor child of Kabwe's Katondwe township is struggling with an advanced form of cancer that is eating up and engulfing his face.
Cancer develops when cells in the body begin to grow out of control. Normal cells grow, divide and die. Instead of dying, cancer cells continue to grow and form new abnormal cells. Cancer cells often travel to other body parts where they grow and replace normal tissue. This is what happened to Aaron whose face keeps bulging due to a serious cancerous growth.
His mother, Martha Mwila behaved like the woman with the issue of blood in the Bible who was determined to touch the hem of Jesus' garment and she would be well. Indeed when she touched the lord her problem immediately came to an end. With the same type of determination Aaron's mother on the morning of December 6th 2007 came through when she heard that Community Development Minister Catherine Namugala would be in Katondwe to launch a community project.
This was in her view the perfect opportunity to draw a high profile individual to her plight- the suffering and pain of her dying son Aaron.
The sight of the boy made Ms Namugala break down and she immediately issued instructions that the boy be taken to Lusaka for medical examinations to ascertain what treatment the boy could receive whether in the country or outside the country.
In less developed countries like Zambia, very few children receive effective treatment for childhood cancer. One major reason for this is that, if the disease is diagnosed at all, it is frequently at such a late stage as to make the prognosis for successful treatment very poor.
On Monday 10th December 2007 Aaron was brought to Ms Namugala's office and she was taken to the University Teaching Hospital for examinations.
UTH public relations manager Pauline Mbangweta confirmed to this author in an interview that the findings of the doctors carrying out tests on the boy would be out in the third week of December.
This was not the first time the boy was coming to the UTH. According to his mother Martha Mwila, the earlier visit to the UTH's cancer diseases hospital a fortnight earlier yielded no fruit and she was ordered to return home to Kabwe with the boy as nothing could be done to help him on grounds that his condition was advanced and could not be subjected to an operation.
She has helplessly watched the cancer grow as earlier attempts to get it treated yielded no results, doctors said Aaron was too young to undergo cancer treatment.
She said the cancer started as a mere growth in the eye but has been growing at an alarming pace and she now doesn't know what to do with it.
Ms Namugala pledged her ministry's support to ensure that the boy receives the much-needed treatment.
According to kidshealth.com, all kinds of cancer, including childhood cancer, have a common disease process - cells grow out of control, develop abnormal sizes and shapes, ignore their typical boundaries inside the body, destroy their neighbor cells, and can ultimately spread (or metastasize) to other organs and tissues. As cancer cells grow, they demand more and more of the body's nutrition. Cancer takes a child's strength, destroys organs and bones, and weakens the body's defenses against other illnesses.
Typically, the factors that trigger cancer in children are usually not the same factors that may cause cancer in adults, such as smoking or exposure to environmental toxins. Rarely, there may be an increased risk of childhood cancer in chidren who have a genetic condition, such as Down syndrome.
Those who have had chemotherapy or radiation treatment for a prior cancer episode may also have an increased risk of cancer. In almost all cases, however, childhood cancers arise from noninherited mutations (or changes) in the genes of growing cells. Because these errors occur randomly and unpredictably, currently there is no effective way to prevent them.
In Zambia, it has been documented before that karposis sarcoma and leukemia were common cancer illnesses among most children with majority of cases coming from Luapula and Northern provinces.
Karposis sarcoma and Burkist Lymphoma are the commonest type of cancer in children. Before the opening of the cancer hospital at the UTH the institution was attending to such cases at an average of one to two a month making an average of 12 to 15 cases annually a number that has significantly increased in recent times.
The major causes of such type of cancers are genetic, exposure to radiation from the sun and chemicals.
Ministry of Health spokesperson told this author recently that people should not just cry to be taken abroad when they have cancer as a facility is now available in the country that can treat cancer. He added that cancer has stages and at a certain point there is nothing that can be done to reverse it whether in Zambia or abroad at which stage only palliative care remains the solution.
Dr Banda advises anyone who suspects cancer to always seek medical attention early as early detection is the solution to treating cancer.
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