Four in five Cuban kids with leukemia get cured

HAVANA, Cuba, May 10 (acn) In Cuba almost 80 percent of children with leukemia have been cured of this type of cancer, the most common in childhood worldwide, said Dr. Sergio Machín, 2nd Degree specialist in Hematology.

He told ACN that this success is comparable with those of developed nations, which represents an important achievement for the national health system.
In Cuba, there is annually an average of 80 new cases and 75 percent of them are acute lymphoid leukemia (ALL), which is the most frequent in that age group and there is fortunately treatment to cure it, while improvement almost reaches 98 percent, the doctor said.
Cuba has a national network for the treatment of malignant hematological diseases in children and it is distributed in seven institutions in the country, two in Havana and the rest in Pinar del Río, Villa Clara, Camagüey, Holguín and Santiago de Cuba.
Machin, who participates in the Hematology 2017 Congress that runs at the Havana Convention Center until Friday with representatives from some 30 countries, noted that the results that Cuba shows are also due to the introduction of last generation chemotherapy treatments.
Most of the treatments for patients with leukemia are imported, some of them with availability problems, because this disease is very expensive, both for medications and supportive therapy.
In Cuba treatment is given totally free; but anywhere else a patient with that malignant disease can annually spend from 30,000 to 60,000 dollars, it depends on the type of leukemia and if it includes a transplant, that figure would extremely higher, he stated.
Dr. Machín emphasized that its cause is not proven, but there may be factors that trigger the disease, which is neither genetic nor hereditary nor contagious.