HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, PUT, PATCH, DELETE, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept
{
"id": 12876,
"url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/12876/?format=api",
"text_counter": 432,
"type": "speech",
"speaker_name": "Mr. Kinyanjui",
"speaker_title": "The Assistant Minister for Roads",
"speaker": {
"id": 48,
"legal_name": "Lee Maiyani Kinyanjui",
"slug": "lee-kinyanjui"
},
"content": " Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, I thank you for granting me the opportunity to participate in this debate. I want to congratulate hon. Maina Kamau for finding time to bring this matter to the attention of the House and, indeed, to the attention of the nation. As we may be aware, many thousands of Kenyans today have been diagnosed with cancer and, as a nation, we appear to be unprepared to deal with the catastrophe that is here. I wish to remind the House that around 2008, a few Members of Parliament had wanted to bring this Bill to the House but as it were, the Ministry of Medical Services said that they would take up the matter and bring it to Parliament as a Government Bill. Unfortunately, that Bill has not found its way to the House to-date. Nevertheless, I feel that this Bill is long overdue. For starters, I would like to say that by nature, cancer is a progressive disease. Therefore, if you are diagnosed with cancer, in another six months or thereabout, the spread of the disease will have progressed. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, therefore, what we have found in this country is that because of lack of adequate medical facilities and poor diagnosis, a lot of our patients are treated with painkillers for lumps and by the time they finally get proper medication, the disease has progressed significantly. It, therefore, becomes much more difficult to treat or cure. Even before we talk about making cancer treatment free for all Kenyans, I think it is very important to agree that we must, first of all, have the facilities that are required. It is one thing to make treatment and another to ensure that the facilities are there. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, if you go to all our provincial general hospitals, you will find that they do not even have the diagnostic capacity, leave alone the treatment. If you go to Nyanza General Hospital, it will take long before you are referred to Nairobi. This has meant that by the time the patients are actually diagnosed with cancer it has progressed significantly and it becomes very difficult to treat. It has been proved in other countries that early diagnosis has significantly reduced the chances of the disease progressing very fast. Therefore, we hope that we will be able to come up with that. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, the other area that I am sure will be addressed as we go through this is the doctors who are qualified to treat cancer or what you may call oncologists. It is said that we have about ten oncologists for a population of about 40 million people. Therefore, if you are looking for a doctor to be able to treat your patient, sometimes the queues are impossible and the patients are very weak, they have come from far. This has made the suffering of the cancer patients even more. Even within the field of oncology, we have radiologists, oncologist and also medical oncologists. If you go further, we are also talking of pediatric oncologists. We only have about three or four. So, we hope that as a Government we should be able to support our students who are pursuing medicine; those who may be willing to take up this particular specialization and those who are willing to get scholarships to ensure that we reduce this burden on the already existing specialists. The other area that we will want to look at is the area of technicians. A lot of times Kenyatta National Hospital and many of our other hospitals have bought very expensive equipment. However, after six months, we cannot service the equipment. As you know, this equipment sometimes is worth hundreds of millions. When you are not able to service it, it is not able to treat the patients. As I talk today, at the KNH the machines that are currently being used for radiology are the old type. We have better machines that can do more localized radiation and this has proved to be very useful. So, we also need to train technicians to ensure that once we get the machines that can treat these people, we are able to progress and ensure that they are kept working and functional throughout their life. The other area we need to look at is the area of medical insurance. A lot of our medical insurance companies do not take care of our patients when they have cancer or they put a limit. When you put a limit it means that after maybe two or three consultations the patients are left on their own. We will need, as a country, to come up with a medical insurance scheme that will ensure that when patients are diagnosed with cancer, they are given the right treatment. There is need for public policy to ensure that everybody in Kenya is actually under some sort of medical insurance. This will be an area that we would want to clearly ensure that we look at. Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, we have very few specialists in the area of cancer. The worst part is that even few as they are, they are all in Nairobi. If you go to Eldoret, Mombasa or Nakuru, you will not get any oncologist. Therefore, this means that the people who come from outside Nairobi are really disadvantaged. We will call upon the Government to invest both as private investors and also as the Government to ensure that we have that. Lastly, in the area of research and development, it has been said that the number of cancer cases have really gone up in the recent years. We are not yet sure what would be the cause of this. Earlier in the day we had debate about some food that is contaminated that may possibly cause that. It would be important for us to try and be able to establish whether these cancer cases that are coming, some of them in very localized areas, have relationship with what we consume, so that we do not end up sitting on a time bomb and find that before long we cannot be able to move on. Lastly, I know under Order No.13, we will be looking at the Cancer Bill. I will invite my hon. colleagues to support it. Thank you."
}