Tests results released on Wednesday say Herceptin is ‘stunning.’ It costs £40,000 in UK. British woman has come to Pune to get the treatment
LONDON: A woman suffering from breast cancer has sold her house in Britain to be treated with Herceptin at a private clinic in India. Linda Vijeh is spending more than £25,000 at a clinic in Pune to be treated by the ‘wonder drug’ rather than wait for it to be made available to her in the UK. She becomes the first British patient to travel abroad for Herceptin.
Fifty-year-old Vijeh was diagnosed with cancer after finding a lump in her right breast in August last year. She was tested and found to have HER-2 positive breast cancer, the form of the disease that can be treated by Herceptin.
Vijeh, who lives in Ilminster in Somerset in south England had her tumour removed and began chemotherapy in March at Treliske Hospital in Cornwall.
It was here that she met an Indian doctor who told her about the drug and its availability in India. The doctor referred her to a consultant at the Ruby Hall Clinic in Pune.
“It takes a leap of faith to fly to a Third World country to be treated by a doctor you've never met in a hospital you’ve never heard of. That is how desperate I was,” said Vijeh.
Vijeh, a former chef to the British Ambassador to the UN in New York and Conservative member of South Somerset District Council, flew out to Mumbai on September 27, after which she had a mastectomy and reconstruction surgery. She is currently receiving one course of Herceptin in Pune, administered intravenously during two-hour sessions every two weeks.
“Herceptin is only licensed in the UK for use where cancer has spread to other parts of the body. Well it’s a bit bloody late then,” said Vijeh speaking from Pune. If Vijeh had gone for similar treatment in a private clinic in Britain, the whole procedure would have cost over £40,000.
Instead in India she has paid no more than £25,000 of which £17,000 is for a years supply of Herceptin drug which she will bring back to the UK with her. Vijeh has sold her house worth £125,000 in Somerset to pay for the life-saving treatment.
‘Effective’ drug
In test results released on Wednesday that researchers called “simply stunning”, the drug Herceptin was shown to dramatically reduce the recurrence of a common type of breast cancer in its early stage after chemotherapy. Three international clinical trials found it to be profoundly effective. A summary of the trials in the New England Journal of Medicine characterised the results as so positive that Herceptin could possibly lead to “a cure” for the disease. Approximately, 400,000 people die annually from the disease. —AFP
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