Yashoda Hospital Hyderabad has organized a Blood Cancer Survivor Meet in Siliguri on the occasion of World Blood Cancer Month. Many patients who have recovered from blood cancer and many successful BMT patients attended this survivor meet. In the summit, Dr Ganesh Jaisetwar, Senior Hematologist and BMT Specialist said, it is necessary to raise awareness about blood cancer and to emphasize that blood cancer is not only completely curable but these patients can live a completely normal life after successful treatment. The goal of this survivor meet is to encourage people to come forward and help people with blood cancer.
“Blood cancer (also known as hematologic cancer) is a type of cancer that affects the blood, bone marrow, or lymphatic system. It belongs to different types of cancer, such as leukemia, lymphoma, and multiple myeloma. Blood cancer accounts for 8.2% of all cancers and 5.5% of the population of 1-lakh in India every year. As such, about 80,000 new blood cancers are being diagnosed every year and every 20 seconds, one person with blood cancer is dying in India”, said Dr Ganesh. He also highlighted the latest advances in the field of blood cancer research and treatment. Most blood cancers are now curable with advanced treatments such as modern chemotherapy, immunotherapy, bone marrow transplant, etc. These medical systems have gone through a number of paradigm shifts over the past few decades that have made them now more effective and less harmful. There has also been tremendous progress in bone marrow transplantation and can now be used to safely treat blood cancer in all patients.
Dr. Ganesh mentioned some of the achievements of the Department of Hematology and BMT of Yashoda Hospital, Hyderabad. These are: (i) India’s first successful double haplo-identical stem cell transplant, (ii) Haplo-identical transplant at age 67, (iii) World’s first single international donor stem cell has been used for BMT of two brothers, (iv) India’s first successful ex-vivo T haplo-identical BMT in adult patients. Yashoda Hospital, Hyderabad has conducted more than 300 successful bone marrow transplants over the last 8 years.
