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Cancer in Africa: The Untold Story

Original research article submitted to Frontiers in Oncology, Cancer Epidemiology and Prevention, 06 Jan. 2021.

Yosr Hamdi, Ines Abdeljaoued-Tej, Afzal Ali Zatchi, Sonia Abdelhak, Samir Boubaker, Joel S. Brown and Alia Benkahla

Welcome to the cancer_africa wiki!

Cancer is an emerging health problem in Africa that needs to be addressed appropriately in order to control for increased incidence and mortality rates. Even though cancer death rates have surpassed those of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, and COVID19 combined, there remains a lack of commitment to fighting cancer in Africa. Despite recent efforts devoted to cancer epidemiology, statistics on cancer in Africa are often dispersed across different cancer registries. In this study, we aimed to collate and analyze the incidence and fatality rates for the 10 most common and fatal cancers in 56 African countries from 5 different African regions (North, West, East, Central, and South) over 16-years (2002–2018). Analysis is performed by gender, by Human Development Index, and by the number of available medical devices. Our results showed that the African continent suffers from a shortage of medical equipment, research resources, and epidemiological expertise. We see a need for implementing more accurate preventive strategies to tackle this disease as many cases are likely preventable. Opportunities exist for vaccination programs for cervical and liver cancer, genetic testing and use of new targeted therapies for breast and prostate cancer, and positive changes in lifestyle for lung, colorectal and bladder cancers.

Steps to run code

The first step is to enter data:

• The file PaysdAfrique.xlsx contains the five African regions, the population by country, and total population by region.
• The file regionsAfrique.xlsx contains the incidence and fatality of the 10 most virulent cancers in Africa. These data were collected from Globocan WHO.
• The file Medical_Devices_Africa.xlsx contains detailed data of Cancer Medical devices per 1,000,000 inhabitants in Central African region: Mammographs (MAM), Computed Tomography (CT), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Positron Emission Tomography (PET), Gamma Camera or Nuclear Medicine (GC), Linear accelerator (LA), Radiotherapy (R) and Telecobalt unit (TU). From the population Pyramids of the various African countries (https://www.populationpyramid.net/), the data of Mammographs per 1,000,000 inhabitants was adjusted: The number of mammographs was multiplied by the population percentage of women between 50 and 69 years old.
• Human Development Index (HDI) of the three most common cancer types (breast, prostate and cervical) in the five African regions. Country specific HDI data were downloaded from UNESCO (http://uis.unesco.org/).

The second step is to install several libraries (in R and Python). See notebook details for the 10 main cancers.