Women in rural areas have limited access to mammography centres resulting in higher rates of late-stage diagnosis for breast cancer.

Silobela Member of Parliament, Honourable Manoki Mpofu said that breast cancer is killing a lot of women and having screening machines in rural setups would help alleviate the problem.  He said there are few campaigns being done around the disease in rural areas.  “Some women are dying not knowing what is killing them. We are appealing to the Ministry of Health, NGOs and other partners to cascade from towns and come to rural areas because women here don’t know much about this condition,” he said.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says that mortality rates are high in low income countries as opposed to high income counties due to delay in seeking health care of breast cancer. Poor treatment outcomes are due to determinants such as inequalities in accessing high quality treatment, lack of facilities for breast cancer screening and poor awareness and knowledge of the disease in low income countries is also a problem.

There are a number of ways for screening for lumps in the breast, including clinical and self-breast exams, mammography, genetic screening, ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests. Breast self-examination is a screening method for early detection of breast cancer. Women can check themselves at home to find any changes in the breast. When done regularly and consistently this helps women to seek early treatment when a lump is still small. Clinical breast examination is another method that is done by well-trained nurses and other qualified health care providers. Mammography can detect the tumour before it is capable of being touched or felt but it has some limitations as sometimes it cannot find the cancer in the breast when in fact the cancer is there. Delay in seeking health care is the reason why more women are succumbing to breast cancer. During stage one, the cancer is quite small and limited within the organ it started in. Stage two is where the tumour or lump would have grown is larger. From stage three the cancer is larger and it may have started to spread into surrounding tissues and there will be cancer cells in the lymph nodes in the area. Stage four, the cancer would have spread from where it started to another body organ.

Interviews conducted in Silobela, Crossroads showed that indeed most women did not have much information pertaining to breast cancer. Sithabile Ncube, 46 said that she always hears about breast cancer every October when she gets texts messages from organisations encouraging women to go get a breast exam. “But I don’t know much about it. I have never really bothered to find out about the signs or symptoms of the disease I just hear about it in passing,” she said. Samantha Moyo, 27 on the other hand knows about breast cancer but called for intensified campaigns in rural areas so that the majority of women would know more about breast cancer.

For Constance Ndhlovu, 56 the issue was more on access to treatment for women in Silobela and other rural areas. “If we could have cancer machines, that is radiation and mammography machines it would go a long way. That way women can get early and timeous treatment because what makes breast cancer so deadly is that women don’t have access to health care services on time and they can’t afford treatment. Having to travel to bigger cities drains us a lot and we can’t afford. But if these machines were more accessible it would help us. Some women in remote, rural areas don’t even know much about breast cancer so there is a lot of work that needs to be done,” she said.

According to the Athens Journal of Health & Medical Sciences of all the Southern African countries, Zimbabwe’s general government expenditure on health has gone down significantly between 1998 and 2013. Low expenditure on health in Zimbabwe is associated with high breast cancer mortality due to shortage of drugs and medical equipment. Poor health service delivery due to centralised services is attributed to the underfunded health system. When it comes to breast cancer, patients are referred to provincial hospital which is accompanied by challenges such as transport and accommodation problem hence worsening the delay to seeking health care of breast cancer.

The most common way to prevent breast cancer is by living a healthy life, eating a healthy diet, keeping a healthy weight and physical activity like exercises.