The government has their own programme and also the private sector. I am from the Indonesian Cancer Foundation and they help the government to promote their programmes. The government has a lot of interest in preventing cancer, especially the Ministry of Health, of course, and several in the parliament are being treated to limit tobacco use, things like that. There is also, with the new coming for insurance cancer is covered. It happened a few years ago in which you get free for the medicine and so. So they try very hard to combat it.
Can you tell us a little bit about what type of cancers are the most common?
The most common is formerly the cervical cancer but now it is breast cancer. Breast cancer goes there, breast cancer, cervical cancer and in men it is nasopharyngeal cancer. Then skin cancer because it is actually data that I mentioned is based on a registry, pathology based registration. That’s why it’s all those cancers that could be biopsied and so it’s more but then also you have leukaemia, of course, in children. We tried really hard to have all those data coming from all parts of Indonesia. You see, Indonesia consists of 240 million people, can you imagine, scattered in about more than how many thousand islands so communication will be the hardest part to connect that. That’s why when someone asks what is the highest it will be very hard because so many hospitals are scattered around those islands and the ones that I just told you are from the Department of Pathology. All the pathologists have to give their data to the centre and that’s why we have all those numbers, while if you ask from the hospital it will be too difficult. You have to add the gynaecologists, you have the skin specialists, you have so many things. But in one hospital there is the pathology department, they just give one, that is the nearest to be sure. 70% of the cancer is diagnosed by the pathologists of course.
What would be your message to the medical community around the world?
Cancer can be cured and it is not a statement to speak about that, that is not a curse, it is more a mind-set. Let’s say we can talk openly and not, ‘You know what? He has cancer,’ not like that before. But because together and, you know, I started with this organisation, the Indonesian Cancer Foundation, and when it was first raised in ’70 and up to now I have lost four of my family to cancer. That is one thing that I want to stop; maybe I’ve got a curse.
