São Paulo Government Announces End of Public Laboratory Combating Cancer

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL – The laboratory of ‘Fundação Oncocentro de São Paulo’ (FOSP), the institution responsible for examinations to detect cancer, provide patient care, and cancerology research, which has been working in public care and assistance for 45 years, is threatened with extinction by Governor João Doria.

The FOSP public laboratory, which serves 342 health units throughout the state of São Paulo, performs about 250 thousand pap smears and 13.7 thousand biopsies of the cervix, breast and skin per year, without counting more than 3 thousand immunohistochemical exams per month with about 1 thousand of these exams for the specific diagnosis of breast cancer.

Although recognized abroad, internally there is no support, according to dentist Andréa Alves de Sousa.

“The dental rehabilitation wing makes 5 thousand appointments and delivers 600 prostheses a year, numbers similar to those of institutions that have twice our team and abundant private resources,” says the dentist.

Sousa also said that FOSP manufactures customized prostheses for cancer victims who have had parts of their heads and necks amputated, in addition to offering assistance to patients from other states in Brazil.

Largest public laboratory in Brazil

The assistant director of the laboratory, Alexandre Muxfeldt Ab’Saber, refuted a technical study by the State Secretariat of Health, which stated that FOSP is “out of phase and idle.”

“Thirty-five employees are responsible for 247,000 exams a year. I also work at ‘Hospital das Clínicas’, the largest in Latin America, and there, with the same number of professionals, 20,000 tests are performed,” he explains.

Ab’Saber recalls that FOSP is the only entity that regulates and reviews the work of other laboratories in the area. “Nobody in the private sector will be interested in doing this kind of work,” he says.

Data from all over the state

Carolina Terra de Moraes, an epidemiologist, highlighted the work of the laboratory in the production of information and coordination of records from 78 hospitals in the oncology network of the state of São Paulo. This database reached 1 million registered tumors.

The data, according to the specialist, are used by researchers, health professionals, and managers to support clinical and epidemiological studies of cancer.