The mortality rate for children diagnosed with cancer is now forty percent.
Paediatric Oncology Unit Doctor Miri Thaggard says in the past fifteen years, the success in carrying out procedures and ways to cure childhood cancer has improved.
Thaggard says close to thirty children in the country are diagnosed with cancer every year.
” Our mortality rate in previous years was 70-80 percent when a child was diagnosed with childhood cancer, now it has gone down. Our mortality rates are around 40 percent if a child is diagnosed with cancer.”
She says she had completed her master’s thesis on this and states that this is good for a developing country like Fiji.
Dr. Thaggard adds the survival rate in developed countries is 80 percent and survival rate for developing countries is 10 percent.
Meanwhile, the mortality rates in Fiji was reduced by working with the Christchurch Oncology Hospital.
