JEDDAH, 22 March 2004 — March is colon cancer month, and to mark it the Eman Cancer Society launched a ten-day Kingdomwide awareness campaign in cooperation with the Saudi Cancer Society in Riyadh and the Eastern Province.
The campaign, the first of its kind in Saudi Arabia, comes in response to an alarming rise in colon cancer here.
According to the Saudi Statistical Center, the colon cancer incidence rate in 1997-98 was 2.8 percent, the ninth most common type of cancer in Saudi Arabia.
Unpublished recent statistics show it has now jumped up to fifth place with a rate of four percent.
The most common cancers are lung cancer for men and breast cancer for women.
“Besides hereditary reasons, eating too much meat and fatty food and not enough vegetables is the main cause of colon cancer,” Dr. Mahmood Al-Ahwal, internal medicine and oncology consultant at King Abdul Aziz University, told Arab News.
Usually colon cancer develops after the age of fifty. Experts recommend that people undergo an annual checkup to detect it as early as possible. “The success rate of treating colon cancer in the early stages is more than 90 percent,” Dr. Al-Ahwal said. But that rapidly decreases as the disease advances. The awareness campaign will see brochures distributed and five vans with billboards roaming the streets of Jeddah, Riyadh and Dammam for a week.
