Ask a family in Balochistan what a cancer diagnosis means, and the answer often begins with a map. Before they think about chemotherapy schedules or survival rates, they think about how far they will have to go.

Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province by area, with communities spread across long, difficult terrain. For a disease that demands months of coordinated care, distance is part of the illness.

A multi-year study published in the Journal of the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan looked at 16,342 tissue biopsy specimens from Balochistan between 2021 and 2024. Of these, 5,145, or 31.5 per cent, were confirmed as malignant. Men accounted for 52 per cent of those cases and women for 48 per cent.

These figures need careful reading. They describe samples sent for testing, not the province’s cancer rate, so they cannot tell us how many people are sick. They do show something plain thousands of confirmed cancer diagnoses in a few years, in a single province.

Now compare that with what is available to treat them.

According to the figures I have reviewed, Balochistan has only one comprehensive public nuclear medicine and oncology hospital: the Center for Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy, known as CENAR, in Quetta, run by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission.........

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