Bucharest will witness a protest demonstration of a grisly kind today. In place of the usual flag-waving radicals demanding political change, the streets of the Romanian capital will be filled with cancer patients pleading with a government that they say has turned its back on them.
The country, which joined the EU on 1 January, is set to become the first member state to obliterate the specialty of oncology. It also introduced a new system last month for allocating cancer drugs which has left thousands of patients without treatment.
More than 370,000 patients have been diagnosed with cancer in Romania but only 76,000 are in treatment, according to official estimates. This year’s budget for cancer treatment has been set at 336m lei (£65m), a fraction of the amount spent in other EU member states. The UK, with a population less than three times as big as Romania’s, spent £4.3bn on cancer in 2005-06.
Organisers of today’s protest in front of the Ministry of Public Health accuse the government of neglecting the suffering of cancer patients. They say ministers are withholding investment because they view cancer patients as economically unproductive.
The Asociata Bolnavilor de Cancer (ABC, the Federation of Cancer Patient Associations) said it had been besieged by calls from desperate patients unable to obtain their drugs. Many were women with breast and gynaecological cancers who had had surgery and radiotherapy but were unable to get chemotherapy.
“They call us every day from all over the country. Many are on waiting lists [for treatment] and cancer is a disease where you cannot wait,” an ABC spokeswoman said.
Referring to the Minister of Health, Eugen Nicolaescu, she said: “He is an economist, not a doctor. He sees just figures and money, not human lives. The government thinks cancer means death. They are not aware that with treatment people can lead near-normal, economically productive lives.”
In September, the government ordered a ban on newly trained doctors joining two-year oncology courses to qualify as specialists.
In future, doctors will train in internal medicine, including only four months on oncology. Critics say this is not enough to develop expertise in the specialty and warn that the decision will lead to Romania falling further behind the rest of the EU in cancer care.
The government also introduced a new system for distributing drugs to cancer patients on 1 April. Previously, it had been handled by hospital pharmacies, but now patients can take a scrip from their doctor to a city pharmacy, and take the drugs at home.
But the pharmacies are reluctant to supply the drugs because of bad experiences in the past with underfunded government schemes. “The Ministry of Health has big debts from past years and they are sceptical that the government will pay this time,” the ABC spokeswoman said. “Cancer drugs are expensive and no one wants to invest a lot of money in buying them and then find re-payments are blocked.”
The cancer care budget has been split between treatment and prevention, a move welcomed by cancer patients’ organisations. But the amount allocated to prevention is too small to pay for cancer screening programmes which have saved thousands of lives in other countries.
