Prevention through awareness - Beating cancer by spreading knowledge.

As a Public Health specialist with a Phd doctorate in cervical cancer screening in women, Antje Henke has been working at the Cancer Care Centre since 2016, when she moved to Tanzania from Germany, along with her husband Dr. Oliver Henke and their three boys. Since then, she has been co-working with the medical staff at KCMC to spread knowledge about cancers and to teach people about the ways to detect symptoms early.

‘In the whole of Sub-Saharan Africa, only little research has been done into cancer…cancer is a major problem, but data and cancer registry are really missing here’, says Antje.

To help tackle this issue, an awareness and prevention outreach program called PrevACamp was started at KCMC in 2017, which Antje has been leading. As part of the program, cancer specialists and nurses from the hospital visit other hospitals and locations in the Kilimanjaro region to provide educational talks and spread awareness about cancer diseases. 

On top of this incredible work, some auxiliary programs have also been set up to help alleviate people’s preoccupations of being diagnosed with cancer and help them deal with life after diagnosis. PrevATrain was created in order to increase the availability of specialized assistance, by training up aspiring health-care workers, while PrevASchool was rolled out to offer cancer education in schools, so that young people could be prepared should they ever be affected by cancer in the future.

In this insightful conversation you’ll hear about the pioneering work that is underway to create more cancer awareness, detection and prevention in Tanzania.

Enjoy!