On World Cancer Day, Sulaymaniyah is Pioneer in Treating the Disease

Dr. Mohammed Suhel Website on Google

Cancer ribbon.

World Cancer Day is an international day observed on February 4 to raise cancer awareness and promote its prevention, detection, and treatment. Sulaymaniyah's Hiwa Cancer Hospital reported 3,310 cancer diagnoses last year, including 201 children.

Cancer is a deadly disease that kills many people worldwide every year. The cause of the disease is still unknown and no vaccine has been developed. It is a disease caused when cells divide uncontrollably and spread into surrounding tissues. Cancer is caused by changes to DNA. There are more than 100 types of cancer.

Sulaymaniyah is the capital of cancer treatment
Dr. Yad Naqshbandi, director of Hiwa Cancer Hospital in Sulaymaniyah, told PUKMEDIA, "Sulaymaniyah is the capital of cancer treatment and bone marrow transplantation in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq." 

Addressing the increase in the number of  cancer cases, he said: "The rise in cancer incidence remains ongoing and global."

"Sulaymaniyah province had 2,675 cancer cases in 2019, but in 2023, we had 3,285 cases, a 1,000-case increase in nearly four years, while 3,310 persons were diagnosed with various types of cancer in the province last year," he added.

"However, the rise in these numbers does not mean that citizens should feel afraid; rather, the government and related parties must must work on early detection of cancer at the highest level," he stated.

History of Cancer
Cancer may have been “discovered” and written about thousands of years ago. However, the disease itself has actually existed since before the evolution of humans.

It was first documented in Egypt about 5,000 years ago. Since that time, people from cultures all over the world have written about the disease and its potential treatments.

In 1838, German pathologist Johannes Muller demonstrated that cancer is made up of cells and not lymph, but he believed that cancer cells did not come from normal cells. Muller proposed that cancer cells developed from budding elements (blastema) between normal tissues.

It was first treated by surgery, although early physicians realized that cancer often came back after surgery.

The German chemist Paul Ehrlich started working with drugs to treat infectious diseases in the early 1900s. He coined the term “chemotherapy” to describe the use of chemicals to treat disease. He wasn’t very optimistic about medicine to treat cancer, though.

Cancer is more common with age, and more people are living longer, increasing the risk of cancer. A better metric of progress is the cancer death rate, which is decreasing, indicating that we are developing better treatments for cancer.

A part of the information in this article was from Verywell Health website.



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