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Notícias / Ridwaan Esmail, head of Imaging and Radiotherapy at the Ministry of Health
The Central Hospital of Maputo (HCM) will start offering radiotherapy services in July, avoiding cancer patients being transferred to foreign units for treatment, the director of the department announced.
“We did a survey of patients treated abroad via the [state] medical board in 2016 and found that 159 went to countries like India, Portugal and South Africa,” said Ridwaan Esmail, head of Imaging and Radiotherapy at the Ministry of Health (MISAU), quoted in today’s edition of Mozambican newspaper Notícias.
The new service will be able to treat about 300 patients per year.
The new radiotherapy treatment will have a team of 12 people at HCM and required doctors, health technicians, nurses and support staff to be specifically trained, he added.
The service will start at a time when there is still little data on how many cancer patients there are in Mozambique.
Based on records in central hospitals in Maputo, Beira (centre) and Nampula (north), the country is estimated to register 3,500 new cases of cancer each year, the newspaper said.
Until now, surgery and chemotherapy had been the main forms of treatment.
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