Cancer behind 70 per cent health-related deaths in India

Indiatvnews.com: Mumbai: Monday, 08 September 2014.

Cancer is among the top ten killers in India. It accounts nearly 7 per cent of 9.5 million annual deaths. An RTI reply has revealed that Cancer caused almost 70 per cent of the 3,887 health-related deaths in the atomic energy hubs across the country between 1995 and 2014.

2,600 people lost their lives at 19 centres during the past two decades, a report published in TOI citing the RTI said.

The query to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), country’s premier nuclear research facility based in Mumbai, also revealed that 255 employees took their own lives while in harness in the same period.

Reports suggested that they were mostly over prolonged illness or family problems.

Dr Altaf Patel, a senior physician and former teacher at JJ Hospital, Byculla, said that such high cancer mortality is alarming and needs to be analyzed further.

The RTI data also showed that the remaining 1,287 of the 3,887 health-related deaths occurred due to these reasons cardiac arrest, strokes, liver failure, multiple organ failure, tuberculosis, cardio-respiratory diseases, septicemia, cirrhosis of liver, cerebro-vascular diseases, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, mellitus, asthma and hypertension.

Most of the deceased in the report were between 29 and 50.