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{
    "id": 12917,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/12917/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 473,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Prof. Anyang’-Nyong’o",
    "speaker_title": "The Minister for Medical Services",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 193,
        "legal_name": "Peter Anyang' Nyong'o",
        "slug": "peter-nyongo"
    },
    "content": "Mr. Temporary Deputy Speaker, Sir, further, the only way we are going to produce professionals locally is if we have enough medical schools in the country. Today, we have five medical schools in the public sector and three medical schools in the private sector. Those are only eight. This country needs, at least, 35 medical schools to produce enough professionals to serve our nation. So, we are still very far from having adequate institutions nationally to produce the kind of specialists we need in the medical sector to serve our people. That is because in the medical sector, almost every aspect needs its own professionals. For example, we need professionals that deal with the eye; that is, ophthalmologists. But there are two types of ophthalmologists. There are pediatric ophthalmologists who deal with children’s problems and the ordinary ophthalmologists who deal with adults. Those two require very specialized training and it costs money. So, if we go down the lane of specialists, as my friend, hon. James Maina Kamau has said, especially in cancer--- Even cancer is not treated generally. There are specialists for throat cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, cervical cancer, breast cancer, head cancer and so on. All those are people who have specially trained for a very long time to zero in on a particular type of cancer and treat it properly. When it comes to the equipment too, the kind of linear accelerator you need for radiation of the prostate cancer is very different from the kind of linear accelerator you need for radiation of breast cancer, for example. If you take, for example, the issue of cyber knife, it will radiate primary prostate cancer. That is prostate cancer that has not gone beyond the prostate gland. In Kenya, I do not know whether we have any cyber knife. So, if you go to Kenyatta National Hospital and get radiated by that C60 Cobalt machine, which radiates a very huge area, it will attack healthy cells rather than concentrating on those particular cells which are cancerous. You can only do that if you have a cyber knife or proper linear accelerator. A cyber knife will cost you about US$3 million or so. So, with the Kshs300 million that we have got in the budget, we may only buy one cancer machine. So, even the money we have in the budget for cancer equipment is very little. We are talking of billions of shillings to equip our referral facilities for proper cancer radiation."
}