The Ministry of Health will be launching an aggressive public awareness campaign to get men tested for prostate cancer
At a press conference, Minister of Health, Dr Frank Anthony noted that there was an increase in prostate cancer last year.
107 persons were diagnosed with prostate cancer in Guyana, which constitutes 11 per cent of all cancer diagnoses in Guyana, the Department of Public Information (DPI) reported.
Dr Anthony, during the examination of the budget estimates, said that a programme has started to deal with prostate cancer and someone has been appointed to head that programme under men’s health.
“Last year, we did buy a number of the machines to deal with PSAs to be able to do the testing, and this year we will be rolling out a more aggressive programme,” he stated.
The minister acknowledged that there needs to be more effort to enlighten the public on what services are available so they can access them.
“We would be launching a special programme targeting men and trying to get them to come in to do testing. We are also going to be able to if they have a large prostate, one of the challenges that we have had before is to do biopsies and you will see on Sunday that we are launching a new pathology lab, where the turnaround time for biopsies will be less than a week,” he said, according to DPI.
He noted that the programme will use popular persons in Guyana who have agreed to be ambassadors of the programme to captivate the attention of men.
“For the prostate cancer programme, when we launch it, you will see some names of persons, very famous people in Guyana who will be on the posters who have agreed to like be the ambassadors of the programme,” Anthony stated.
