26-06-2025
Attempts under way to fix gap in SA's plan to fight cancer
Experts say cancer patients in the public sector in South Africa are dying for avoidable reasons like dysfunctional referral systems and a lack of medical imaging and treatment. We look at efforts to get the country's battle with cancer back on track.
Many people with cancer in Gauteng have not been able to access the treatment and care they require in recent years. Though activists and the provincial government are at odds about what should, or should have been, done about it, nobody is denying that there is a problem.
At the same time, there has also been issues at a national level, with South Africa's key cancer strategy having lapsed. The National Cancer Strategic Framework for South Africa 2017—2022 was previously extended to also cover 2023. Medical Brief recently reported that a new strategy is on the verge of being signed by the director-general of health.
The committee meant to advise the minister on cancer has also lapsed. Dr Busisiwe Ndlovu, the top government official in charge of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), said that the term of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Cancer expired in early 2024, and new members were pending the approval of health minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi. She was speaking at the KwaZulu-Natal leg of a cancer research and innovation strategy workshop in May. These consultative meetings are taking place across the country's provinces. It aims to shape a national research and innovation strategy based on the World Health Organization's cancer-control pillars:
prevention;
early detection and diagnosis;
treatment; and
palliative care and survivorship.
The scale of the problem
While researchers anticipate that rates of infectious diseases like HIV and tuberculosis in South Africa will decline in the coming decade or two, rates of NCDs, including diabetes and cancers, are expected to increase. According to the WHO, an estimated one in five people will develop some form of cancer in their lifetimes. Increases in developing countries are expected to be particularly steep.
According to a Stats SA report published in 2023, and based on National Cancer registry (NCR) numbers and Stats SA's mortality data, cancer-related deaths in the country increased by 29% from 2008 to 2018. They reported that 85,000 people were diagnosed with cancer in 2019 and that 44,000 died of cancers in 2018. Experts previously told Spotlight that the estimate of cancer cases may be an undercount of as much as 40%.
