‘Over half of 70,000 cancer patients at PGH poor’

MANILA, Philippines — More than half of the 70,000 cancer patients being treated at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH) are poor, according to a cancer expert.

“In a year, we are looking at 60,000 to 70,000 (cancer) patients at the PGH. Of that number, there are around 40,000 poor patients,” PGH Cancer Institute head Dr. Jorge Ignacio said at a recent media briefing.

Ignacio noted that they are attending to an average of 500 patients every day, and the poor cancer patients still undergo chemotherapy.

“We still rely on chemotherapy because this is affordable in a way. These patients would not be able to avail themselves of the new medicines that are more expensive,” he said.

“If you are talking about the ordinary chemotherapy, we can say that it is not as costly as before. When we started out training for breast cancer, it would cost you around P15,000. Right now, for the ordinary chemotherapy, it is less than P5,000. Why is it so? Because there is now a deluge of drugs coming in from India, China, Indonesia and Korea. They try to beat each other for the cost of the drug that is actually working good for the patient,” Ignacio added.

The oncologist, however, said their problem is the limited number of chemotherapy sessions that they can do in a day.

“Our outpatient caters to around 60 chemotherapy infusions,” he said.

As for patients who are well-off, there is now the targeted therapy and immunotherapy as forms of treatment, according to Ignacio.

Targeted therapy uses medicines that work differently from standard chemotherapy drugs.

These targeted drugs, according to the Philippine Cancer Society, are most often used along with chemotherapy.

Ignacio said targeted therapy for breast cancer costs P30,000 every three weeks, or P120,000 in a year.

He added that 15 percent or around 20,000 of PGH patients receive this type of cancer treatment.

Ignacio said the top five cancers in the Philippines are breast, lung, colon, liver and prostate.

“If you look at cancer incidents in the country, number one will be breast cancer. That is why we need a bigger funding for this,” he said.