Watch your child for addiction; it can cause cancer
A ten-year-old boy from Nashik contracted cancer by chewing leftover tobacco from his father’s gutka packet. He succumbed to the disease, showing how parents need to monitor their young, surgical oncologist Dr Raj Nagarkar tells Anuradha Mascarenhas
Dr Raj Nagarkar, managing director and surgical oncologist at HCG Manavata Cancer Centre, Nashik. This is one cancer story that no parent would like to hear about but for Dr Raj Nagarkar, managing director and surgical oncologist at HCG Manavata Cancer Centre, Nashik, it has been an eye-opener on how deadly tobacco consumption can be.
A ten-year-old boy from Nashik, who picked up the habit of consuming tobacco from his father’s leftover gutka packets, developed cancer after a month of use and died within four years of diagnosis despite best efforts. Dr Nagarkar, who has performed more than 45,000 cancer surgeries in the last 20 years and operates on at least 250 cancer patients every month, was aghast when a cancer survivor (a woman teacher whom he had treated) brought a ten-year-old boy to the outpatient department. “Being a vigilant teacher, she had noticed that the boy would eat all alone during lunch break because he could not keep up with his peers. He had difficulty chewing his food. I thought it would be an ulcer but strongly suspected cancerous lesions. A biopsy confirmed my worst fears. After much coaxing, the boy told me how his father would ask him to purchase some tobacco packets from a shop and keep the leftovers. The child started chewing some of the tobacco ingredients for at least a month or so,” Dr Nagarkar said.
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