 Good evening everyone, my name is Dr. Eugene Rind and I'm a cancer surgeon. So basically I'm a surgeon who deals with the management of cancer and I'm here today to talk to you about the coronavirus and how to manage cancer during this COVID times. I've not been a part of any Facebook event or any of these webinars or any of these Zoom events in the last few months but now seeing what's happening to my patients, seeing the condition that they're coming in, I feel that is my moral responsibility to come up and talk about it. So that's the reason I'm doing this. It's not a promotional event or not to really promote any certain product or any recent treatment of coronavirus. So just to give you a little bit of history, I've been in the cancer treatment for the last eight years and in the last eight years I've seen a lot of patients who come in stage one and stage two cancer, which means that they have a cure rate of anywhere between 90% to 100%. Then you have the patients in stage three who have got a cure rate of about 60 to 50% and then the unfortunate few, some unfortunate few, some who have ignored the symptoms or refused to go to a hospital who come in at stage four. So just concentrating on my stage one and stage two patients, in the last eight years I may have seen probably a handful, I can name the patients in whom the disease is record, which means that stage one and stage two cancers are curable. So we were in the business of saving lives because we used to see a lot of patients in these stages. Now fast forward to mid-July 2020 and things are very different now. People who were diagnosed in February, I have a lot of patients, I have probably eight patients in the last week who were diagnosed in February or March, who sat at home saying let the coronavirus pass and then we'll go for treatment. They waited for three, four months and have now come for evaluation. At that time they had an early disease, but now they've come in with jaundice, with breathlessness, with water collecting in the tummy. So basically they've come in with the stage four cancer. Somebody who had a 90% cure rate has come in with a nearly incurable disease. And it's all because of fear of coronavirus and not the coronavirus itself. So do we have to really be this scared of going to a hospital? Let me just put it in simple terms. When you walk into a hospital, you're going somewhere where everyone from the security guard, down to the surgeon, knows everything that needs to be known about preventing the spread of this disease. So everybody is wearing a face shield, they're wearing a mask, they're all wearing gloves. They're doing all this to protect themselves and their families. And in the process they protect you as well. Compare that to a grocery store. You walk into a grocery store, people are either hanging the mask around, under the nose or hanging the mask around the neck. Some of them have got their masks in their pocket. And the funny thing is a lot of people wearing a mask will walk up to you, pull the mask down, talk to you and then wear the mask again. People are coughing, sneezing, touching things. It's very common to see people touching a lot of things, checking on products. So basically in a grocery store, a lot of people are causing what's called as formites, that is they're touching a lot of things which you will eventually go and touch and which causes the disease to spread. So basically your chance of getting coronavirus in a hospital is much lower than your chance of getting infected in any other, in a grocery store or a restaurant or a park or things like that. So just as an example, me and my colleagues, if you look at all the nurses and all the paramedics in my hospital, we probably about 80 to 100 of us who are putting in 8 hours a day in hospital, not one of us has been infected with the virus, which means that protecting yourself this way works and going to a hospital is harmless. Now how does this extrapolate to cancer care? So like I told you earlier, a patient in stage one or a patient in stage two has got a cure rate of about 90 to 100%. So think about it. How many people have got coronavirus and go as of today? It's about 300 people, 3,000 people. How many of them have died of the disease? It's about 10 people. So basically out of 3,000 people who are infected, 10 people have died of the disease, which means coronavirus is killing 0.65 or say less than 1% of the people it infects. So if you get contracted with the disease, you have a 1% chance of dying of the disease. But cancer, if you have a stage one and stage two cancer, if you treat it, your chance of death is negligible. But if you move to a stage three and a stage four cancer, your chance of death goes up significantly. So what I'm trying to get at is, if you have a curable cancer, if you have an early stage cancer, please do not delay treatment. Get to a hospital as soon as possible, because you have more likely to die of the disease rather than to die of coronavirus. In fact, it's very, very unlikely that you're going to die of the virus. And this applies not only to cancer. It applies to heart diseases. It applies to stroke. It applies to asthma. It applies to a lot of neurological diseases. But most importantly, it applies to antinatal checkups. What is antinatal checkups? These are the checkups which are done for pregnant women. So when a lady is pregnant, she goes through a regular checkup to a gynecologist to check the well-being of the baby and well-being of the mother. A lot of people are not doing their antinatal checkups. They're not going to a doctor because they skate them and get infected. And then they are suddenly coming with bleeding. They're coming with the cord around the neck. They're coming with so many other issues which could have been tackled if you had gone for a regular antinatal checkups. So do not avoid your antinatal checkups. It's very important, both for your well-being and the well-being of your baby. And it's very unlikely that during these checkups, you're going to get infected with the virus. So that's about how important treatment is. You need to get to a hospital. You need to start your treatment. And you need to get things done as I said earlier. Coming to cost of treatment. I do agree cancer treatment can be expensive. A lot of people have lost their jobs. People are at home. People are wondering where the next, there are people wondering where the next meal is going to come from. If you have your dindial card, I will guarantee free treatment under our care. For a general world patient, dindial treatment is done, virtually free of cost, just to the basic investigations need to be paid for. So if you have the card, or if you have any other form of support from any other institution, we get the treatment done free of cost. So do not delay your treatment for the sake of economics. The economic issues we will take care of, you just take care of getting better. And more importantly, getting to a person who will treat your disease. Am I underplaying the how important coronaviruses? No, I'm not. I cannot overestimate how dangerous this disease is. It is dangerous. It can take lives, but there are ways to prevent it. Follow the basic rules which I mentioned. Wear a mask at all times. Invest in a face shield, because it's very, very important in preventing people's saliva and things from spurting, or cough from spurting. When you're removing your mask, do not pull it straight off the face, remove it from the bands at the side, and make a habit not to touch the mask, because any person coughing, it can spray onto your mask. Have a bath as soon as you go back home, keep your clothes separately and wash them immediately. Do not let children play with your clothes which you won't to work. So, when you go to a grocery store, pre-list what all you want, get in there, pick up whatever you want, drop it into your bag, go back home, and just keep them all on the shelf. Do not interact too much with the outside world. Does that mean that you do not go outside, do you remain cooped up at home? No, you do not. You live your lives because the pandemic is here to stay. You go out, you do your activities, you get your exercise in. When I say exercise, I mean a morning walk or a morning jog is very important because you're spending months and months and months locked up at home. Do not do that. When you go out for a walk, you're out in the open air with nobody around you. The next person is six to seven meters away. When you're in a grocery store, the next person is six to seven inches away. So if you're somebody who visits a grocery store, you're somebody who can do your morning exercises. Get your exercises in, get your health in order, and get your cancer treatment, your asthma treatment, and all these treatments done. The next thing people ask me, you should I take surgery or radiation or chemotherapy for cancer? It's not the coronavirus that decides what treatment you need. It is your disease that decides what treatment you need. Cancer is not one disease, but a collection of different diseases. And depending on what disease you have, based on that, you need to get your treatment done. What if you have coronavirus and cancer? If you're somebody who's diagnosed with cancer and is infected with coronavirus, then I would suggest that you wait for three to four weeks before taking treatment, because the coronavirus tends to affect the lungs. It tends to reduce your lung function. Now, when you're taking treatment for cancer, again, further, you'll need anesthesia for surgery or you'll need drugs for chemotherapy which compromise your body function. So the coronavirus reduces your lung function. The cancer treatment also reduces your lung function. This can be a two-hit, it can be two bullets at one shot and it can be life threatening. So if you have the coronavirus, if you're COVID infected, wait for a month and then get cancer treatment. Do not get cancer treatment when you have the disease. What food do I advise? There's no relation between food and the pandemic. You can eat what you want, but stick to a healthy diet for a general well-being, but there's no relation between food and this disease. What precautions do I advise to prevent cancer? Now, that has nothing to do with coronavirus, but these are all questions which people had put during my online talk which actually didn't happen. So basically, the food that prevention is basically done by a regular checkup. You need to go for a yearly checkup. At the moment, because of the disease, you do not go for a yearly checkup. You avoid a checkup for cancer per se. For, like I said, anti-natal checkups, you do not avoid, but if cancer checkups, you tend to avoid them right now. Start doing them once things settle down and get a yearly checkup done where you'll get a few blood tests, you'll get a mammogram in the case of women and perhaps you're done in women and for men, you get a PSA test. So basically, I'm not going to go into the details of this. I'm going to stick to coronavirus-related stuff. So basically, the bottom line is do not be scared of the disease. At the same time, do not take it lightly. If you have cancer, get to a center immediately. If financial issues is something that's troubling you, get in touch with me. I will help you get your financial issues sorted for the treatment. If you need any queries, if you have any doubts, you can always get in touch with me. I can put my number down. You send me a message on Facebook. I can send you my contact number. You can get in touch with me and I'll help you get through your cancer because getting through cancer is not a one-man job. It's a team that helps you and I can organize the team and help you get things done. Thank you very much.