MULTAN: Children’s Hospital in Pakistan’s Multan city has become the only healthcare facility in South Punjab to offer advanced blood cancer diagnostics with the activation of the Flow Cytometer Machine.
The state-of-the-art technology is now fully functional and accessible for patient care. The hospital administration has also ensured that all necessary reagents and materials are available.
This advanced diagnostic facility, available exclusively at Children’s Hospital Multan, provides immunophenotyping tests, which are essential for the precise diagnosis and treatment of acute leukaemia (blood cancer) patients.
This achievement is a beacon of hope for blood cancer patients in South Punjab, offering timely diagnostics closer to home.
Acute lymphocytic leukaemia is the most common disease in children that also needs an early diagnosis for on-time treatment as it spreads rapidly in the blood and forms immature lymphocytes. This might cause death in some weeks if left untreated.
Health experts have stressed early detection and timely screening of leukaemia and emphasised that there’s a dire need to create awareness in the public regarding the disease to fight cancer in children.
Most of the leukaemia cases in Pakistan go unreported in children and are not diagnosed on time due to the lack of awareness.
The latest figure shows that in Pakistan, there are approximately 4.1 million prevalent cancer cases out of which 1.7 million are males and 2.4 million females. According to the Burden of Disease (BOD) data for Pakistan, 2.7 million cases are reported every year.
Pakistan holds the highest rate of breast cancer cases in Asia, with one in every nine women expected to face the disease.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) globally, more than 400 000 children and adolescents aged 0–19 years are diagnosed with cancer every year.
