Mammogram Van with facility to screen breast and cervical cancers in remote villages of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh

The number of cases of breast cancer, cervical cancer, and oral cancer is on a rise in Telangana. Rural people do not know enough about cancers and usually come to seek medical care. It is very essential that we need to educate rural Telangana on what cancer is and how to do a self-examination for breast cancer detection.

Early cancer detection is the only key to save lives of the innocent rural women which is possible to regularly conduct screening camps for breast, cervical and oral cancers.

It is estimated that only 15% of Indian women know what sanitary napkin is and in rural Telangana, women use cloths and reuse them by washing. After 3 days of periods, they dry the cloth and use it next month. Some Tribals use mud pack or fresh banana leaves. There is a great need to educate women about the necessity of menstrual hygiene. Swastava has covered 10,000 women and youth during the year 2018-19 and targets 15,000 during the current year. The proposed van will have the facility to show videos and presentations to the masses once camped in a village and educate rural women and men.

Swastava has been organising screening camps for quite some time now and has just completed the Sultanpur -Medak district where we examined 100 women and found 5 women positive to cervical cancer. This programme was sponsored by a corporate under CSR and has plans to sponsor a few more in nearby villages. We had conducted this camp with a colposcopy to detect cervical cancer at an early stage and identified 5 cases out of the 100 women examined. For breast cancer, we only have the provision for physical examination by a cancer specialist and need tools for screening masses in big numbers. Thermography with AI is now popular for this. A new technique, Orography, has come into the market through an invention from IIT Madras. We also need a Mammogram with console and printer, so that we can give reports to the patient and escort her to the hospital.

Swastava is all set to take off with partial support from Rotary and short of partial funding to make the van fully-loaded to be able to hit the road to reach rural masses to educate, screen and save lives.

The impact which is measurable will be recorded during each camp and a register will be maintained. It is proposed that this vehicle will cover 4 villages per month, covering women who are 40+ for oral, breast, and cervical cancer. We have 120 Rotary clubs in Rotary district 3150 which covers entire Telangana, and each club will sponsor one camp. Thus, in 5 years we would have covered all district headquarters and Mandal headquarters beside some villages which have a high incidence of the disease.

We also propose to cover 3 million senior citizens who are the most neglected lot in the society and check for cancers which are a heavy burden on the senior citizen to tolerate besides the problems of old age.

Thus, we will be achieving early cancer detection and helping patients in reaching hospital early to enable doctors to treat them and save lives.