The Uganda Cancer Institute is set to relocate the Mulago water tank to pave way for the construction of the second phase of the PET center. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a new technology for cancer care that uses mildly radioactive liquid to show areas of the body where cancer cells are more active than normal.
Jackson Orem, the Executive Director of the Uganda Cancer Institute, while speaking to journalists at the groundbreaking ceremony of the tank house, highlighted that there was a dire need for the country to have a PET center. He added that the first phase of the construction of the center started and was to house the nuclear medicine, which was done and well equipped. Now, they are embarking on the construction of the building to house the PET and the machine that generates the isotopes.
“As we were doing that in the design phase, we realized that the area is encroaching the entire area where there is a water tank supplying the entire Mulago hill, hence the need to relocate the tank,” Dr. Orem stated.
According to Dr. Orem, the institute is aiming at not only treating cancer but curing it completely. He added that the PET technology will help them to detect where the cancer cells are so that the treatment is targeted to that specific area, which is not the case currently when it comes to cancer care. Furthermore, Dr. Orem said that the PET technology will be able to treat even other diseases, even though its main purpose is cancer treatment.
David Nuwamanya, representing the executive director of Mulago National Referral Hospital, pointed out that the tank house is very important not only for UCI but for the entire Mulago hill. He added that 10 years ago, 50 institutions on Mulago hill were benefiting from one tank and the supply was adequate. He also said that now, with the expansion of services like the women’s hospital with a bed capacity of 450 beds, Mulago Hospital handles patients with diseases of complex nature, and the number of patients has increased. All these have led to high water consumption, and Mulago has been surviving on only 500,000 liters of water, which was the capacity of the relocated tank built in the 1960s.
Now, the design of the new water tank will have a capacity of 1.5 million liters, but Nuwamanya said that there is a need to increase the design capacity of the new Mulago water tank to 2 million liters because of the increase in daily water consumption in the hospital. “When you make a design, make a provision that in future when the demand increases, we don’t have to demolish or shift people. Please, designers, make a provision for scalability of capacity,” Nuwamanya stated.