African government forced to choose which diseases it can afford to treat

The African country of Rwanda continues to experience an increase in the number of deaths arising from communicable and non-communicable diseases, with cancer being one of the major killers in the latter category.

While battling such communicable diseases as malaria, tuberculosis, and leprosy, the Rwandan government and citizens have for the past 12 years also struggled against the rising rate of cancer deaths. Doing so with such a scarcity of resources, the government has been able to lower the number of reported communicable disease related deaths, but this has come at the expense of a marked development in the number of non-communicable diseases and associated deaths. Sadly, these statistics are also representative of the continent on the whole.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the continent of Africa saw 530,000 new cases of cancer in 2002 alone. This number is expected to rise to approximately 804,000 new cases by the year 2020. During that same year, 2002, there were a reported 412,000 deaths stemming from cancer related illnesses reported in Africa, a number that may rise to as high as 626,000 by the year 2020.

It's extremely sad to think that one of the major reasons why non-communicable disease in Africa are on the rise because an economic choice had to be made.