One Health and cancer: A comparative study of human and canine cancers in Nairobi

Research Article

International Journal of One Health, 2: 42-57

https://doi.org/10.14202/IJOH.2016.42-57

Nyariaro Kelvin Momanyi^1,2, Rugutt Anne Korir³, and Riungu Erastus Mutiga¹

1. Department of Clinical Studies, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Nairobi, Kenya.
2. Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies and The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, Roslin, UK.
3. Cancer Registry Unit, Centre for Clinical Research, Kenya Medical Research Institute, Kenya.

Background and Aim: Recent trends in comparative animal and human research inform us that collaborative research plays a key role in deciphering and solving cancer challenges. Globally, cancer is a devastating diagnosis with an increasing burden in both humans and dogs and ranks as the number three killer among humans in Kenya. This study aimed to provide comparative information on cancers affecting humans and dogs in Nairobi, Kenya.

Materials and Methods: Dog data collection was by cancer case finding from five veterinary clinics and two diagnostic laboratories, whereas the human dataset was from the Nairobi Cancer Registry covering the period 2002-2012. The analysis was achieved using IBM SPSS Statistics® v.20 (Dog data) and CanReg5 (human data). The human population was estimated from the Kenya National Census, whereas the dog population was estimated from the human using a human:dog ratio of 4.1:1.

Results: A total of 15,558 human and 367 dog cancer cases were identified. In humans, females had higher cancer cases 8993 (an age-standardized rate of 179.3 per 100,000) compared to 6565 in males (122.1 per 100,000). This order was reversed in dogs where males had higher cases 198 (14.9 per 100,000) compared to 169 (17.5 per 100,000) in females. The incident cancer cases increased over the 11-year study period in both species. Common cancers affecting both humans and dogs were: Prostate (30.4, 0.8), the respiratory tract (8.3, 1.3), lymphoma (5.6, 1.4), and liver and biliary tract (6.3, 0.5), whereas, in females, they were: Breast (44.5, 3.6), lip, oral cavity, and pharynx (8.8, 0.6), liver and biliary tract (6.5, 1.2), and lymphoma (6.0, 0.6), respectively, per 100,000.

Conclusion: The commonality of some of the cancers in both humans and dogs fortifies that it may be possible to use dogs as models and sentinels in studying human cancers in Kenya and Africa. We further infer that developing joint animalhuman cancer registries and integrated cancer surveillance systems may lead to accelerated detection of the risks of cancer in Africa. Keywords: Africa, cancer, cancer registry, comparative oncology, Kenya, Nairobi, One Health.

Keywords: Africa, cancer, cancer registry, comparative oncology, Kenya, Nairobi, One Health.

How to cite this article: Momanyi NK, Korir RA, Mutiga RE. One Health and cancer: A comparative study of human and canine cancers in Nairobi. Int J One Health 2016;2:42-57.

Received: 06-07-2016 Accepted: 21-10-2016 Published online: 19-11-2016

Corresponding author: Nyariaro Kelvin Momanyi E-mail: momanyink@gmail.com

DOI: 10.14202/IJOH.2016.42-57

Copyright: Momanyi, et al. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.