Algeria’s Chahids Mahmoudi Hospital is set to become a leading cancer treatment center in North Africa and the continent as a whole. According to GE Africa, the privately owned hospital in the Tizi Ouzou province of the country boasts some of the best doctors, nurses, and technicians required to develop a world-class treatment facility.
The hospital is equipped with state of the art technology like the Discovery PET scanner and the PET Trace 840 Cyclotron, which provide the medical staff with faster, more accurate diagnoses. The Discovery PET scanner provides the hospital’s doctors with both metabolic and anatomical information, thereby helping provide an accurate indication, not only of the location of the disease, but its progress as well. It also delivers superior image quality.
The hospital is poised to contribute significantly to the government’s efforts to provide frontline cancer treatment for citizens so they no longer need to seek expensive treatment abroad.
Over the years, cancer has become an important health concern in the developing world, with the prevalence rate in Africa rising steadily. Some health professionals however note that cancer is still erroneously considered as a disease of the rich and affluent and therefore only a health concern for Western countries. In reality, breast and cervical cancer have a higher prevalence in Black people and persons of African descent.
A report in ScienceInAfrica estimates that the risk of dying from a range of cancers in many African countries is greater than of that in the U.S. or U.K. The report adds that more than half of the approximately 8 million deaths from cancer in 2008 occurred in populations in the developing world, which was expected to increase by over two-thirds in the next 20 years.
Experts suggest that early diagnosis through routine screening and enlightenment campaigns are the best ways to detect and treat cancer before it spreads.
