Frank Muscat's work and personal experience qualify him to speak with authority on the public health service here and in the UK. But his last piece (March 6) on the public cancer services and their future development in Malta calls for some criticism.
To begin with, no national cancer service plan, or any coming together of government and opposition, is ever going to win the war against cancer. Such a war is more likely to be won in some advanced, sophisticated laboratory researching into fundamental human cell biology.
This said, it remains of great importance to every citizen in our ageing population to have an efficient, updated public cancer service. We are fortunate here in Malta to have a good service currently available, considering our limitations in human and material resources. But as with everything else we need to go on striving to improve the service using our resources to the best advantage. To achieve this we should avoid fuzzy thinking couched in high-sounding language and cast in officious departmental memoranda or consultation documents.
What has so far been attained, we should hang on to and build on.
The campaign against smoking must be reactivated and the Health Information Unit should refresh its propaganda for healthy eating and drinking and against all forms of pollution.
The breast screening programme must be set up in earnest while cervical and colo-rectal screening should be put on a back-burner as they are less cost-effective. Instead, a vaccination programme against cervical cancer should be considered.
The public should be further informed and educated regarding the early symptoms of cancer and persuaded to seek timely advice.
With regard to treatment we should see that waiting time for consultation or therapy is reduced to an absolute minimum.
It is right that the provision of a PET scanner be given a low priority. It is an adjuvant and highly expensive piece of apparatus dependent on the ongoing supply of a radionucleide with a short half-life produced elsewhere in special centres in Europe, and which would have to be flown in regularly come shower or shine. The money would be better spent providing costly new effective pharmaceuticals like herceptin.
And finally I am glad that the idea of so-called integrative medicine is not even mentioned by our public health service administrators. And it is not a matter of taboo. It is in fact a non-starter as it has no basis in scientific evidence.
Instead, we should aim at the early opening of a ward unit specifically dedicated to palliative and terminal care.