African Cancer Organisation establishes Information Service Centre in Accra

African Cancer Organisation (ACO) has established a Cancer Information Service (CIS) Centre in Accra, to offer information about cancer prevention to businesses and the general public. The aim was to promote awareness of cancer and early detection through culturally sensitive and linguistically appropriate cancer prevention training programmes.

This was in a statement issued by the ACO on Friday.It said: “This we believe will help prevent people from getting exposed to avoidable cancer risk factors and also help downstage cancers by early-detecting the disease at stages where cure is often possible, which will ultimately help avert the currently prevailing high incidence of cancers in Ghana.”

The statement said the goal of the project was to ensure that everyone living in Ghana has easy access to cancer prevention information service, adding that it would also establish the needed infrastructure and build capacity of personnel required to provide cancer information outreach service to businesses and the public.

“The trained cancer information specialists will either provide interaction by telephone, e-mail, instant messaging, social media, in-person visit or on-site training for institutions, businesses and the general public,” it said.

The statement said the CIS would distribute educational materials to people about cancer, its prevention, causes and risk factors, signs and symptoms of cancer, cancer diagnosis, cancer treatment, management and support available systems.

It said; “The CIS will navigate people to appropriate facilities for screening, further diagnosis, management and support. ACO CIS, tailored to the socio-economic and cultural context, is to ensure that cancer information is available to everyone who is eligible.”

The statement said although much remained to be learnt about cancer, enough was now known about the causes of cancer and means of control for suitable intervention to have a significant impact and that there was solid evidence that making cancer information available and diagnosing it at an early stage would reduce deaths from cancer.

“Most Africans cannot currently access curative therapies, state-of-the-art surgery or expensive cancer drugs that are the mainstay of cancer care in developed nations. At the same time up to 50 per cent of cancers are preventable, and a third of all cancers could be cured if detected early,” it said.

The statement said scaling up primary prevention and early diagnosis was the most cost-effective ways of dealing with cancer in Africa and Ghana as a whole and that the ACO was looking for partners with similar mandate to collaborate to sustain the CIS.