As the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe announced that the country has no sanctions at all on either imports or exports, the permanent secretary in the health ministry has revealed the country has got only one cancer machine.  

Zimbabwe has just one operational cancer machine, said, Jasper Chimedza.

 In order to discuss the nation’s curative cancer care, Chimedza appeared before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Health and Child Care, chaired by Dr Ruth Labode. In at least 50% of cancer cases, radiotherapy machines are employed, and yet the country has only one. 

Said Chimedza:

In the private sector, we have one of the facilities in Newlands which continues to offer cancer radiotherapy services to both the public and the private sectors. It is not an ideal situation whereby we have one machine working in the country. We need more cancer machines. Patients should not be travelling long distances to access cancer treatment. We need the machines at provincial hospitals.

The machines that we have are not outdated. What we need is software updates and a few areas that need to be attended to. But as part of our thrust as a ministry, we want to extend this service to provincial hospitals. The next phase in terms of procurement of radiotherapy machines is replacement of these machines at provincial hospitals so that patients do not keep on travelling from different provinces to access services.