ShareKUWAIT: Kuwaiti Health Minister Dr Ahmad Al-Awadhi said on Thursday that the ministry attaches great importance to medicine security, including different cancer medicines, in the country. The ministry is keen on providing medicine, especially cancer drugs, and is making great efforts to build a new hospital to fight cancer, promote research on cancer and develop multiple programs for detecting the disease at an early stage.
Al-Awadhi was delivering a speech during the first Kuwait International Gynecologic Oncology Conference on Thursday. The three-day conference effectively contributes to exchanging expertise, medical experiences and knowledge on the latest findings in the field of diagnosing cancerous tumors and ways to treat and prevent it. An eminent group of doctors who are lecturers from inside and outside Kuwait, are participating in the conference through scientific sessions and workshops, as well as performing surgical operations for gynecological tumors, explained Al-Awadhi.
Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Oncology Association and Head of the Surgery Department at the Kuwait Cancer Control Center Dr Khaled Al-Khalidi said that the Surgical Oncology Department is one of the leading departments in the Center, as it has performed 8,500 surgical operations over the past five years, including a thousand operations for gynecological tumors. He said COVID-19 pandemic failed to hinder the hospital from performing these operations, he said.
Regarding gynecological tumors, Al-Khalidi indicated that the most common tumor is uterine cancer at a rate of eight percent, followed by ovarian cancer at a rate of six percent, followed by cervical cancer at a rate of two percent of all tumors that have been registered in Kuwait. He stated that this year the conference chose the topic of gynecological tumors because of its prevalence in Kuwaiti society. It is considered the most common disease after breast tumors, he said, pointing out that this conference comes within the ministry’s efforts to serve cancer patients and improve health services, noting that four surgeries were performed on Tuesday using new methods.
In turn, Head of the Radiotherapy Physics Unit and Secretary General of the Kuwaiti Association for Medical Physics, Dr Shaikha Al-Obaidli said that the conference hosted a workshop specializing in treatment planning for internal radiation technology (close-up) for gynecological cancer tumors. She said internal radiation operations are one of the most important technologies used to treat uterine and cervical cancer.
In this method, the radiation source is placed within the body or tissues with the aim of delivering the highest dose of radiation to the part of the body to be treated, while harming nearby healthy tissues as little as possible. She pointed out that this workshop focuses on the scientific and practical explanation of the latest methods of internal radiotherapy, aiming to develop radiation services specialized in treating gynecological tumors in Kuwait. — KUNA
