Ask a family in Balochistan what a cancer diagnosis means, and the answer often begins with a map. Before they think about chemotherapy schedules or survival rates, they think about how far they will have to go.
Balochistan is Pakistan’s largest province by area, with communities spread across long, difficult terrain. For a disease that demands months of coordinated care, distance is part of the illness.
A multi-year study published in the Journal of the College of Physicians and Surgeons Pakistan looked at 16,342 tissue biopsy specimens from Balochistan between 2021 and 2024. Of these, 5,145, or 31.5 per cent, were confirmed as malignant. Men accounted for 52 per cent of those cases and women for 48 per cent.
These figures need careful reading. They describe samples sent for testing, not the province’s cancer rate, so they cannot tell us how many people are sick. They do show something plain thousands of confirmed cancer diagnoses in a few years, in a single province.
Now compare that with what is available to treat them.
According to the figures I have reviewed, Balochistan has only one comprehensive public nuclear medicine and oncology hospital: the Center for Nuclear Medicine and Radiotherapy, known as CENAR, in Quetta, run by the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission. Paediatric cancer care is concentrated at a single satellite unit run by the Indus Hospital and Health Network inside Quetta’s Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Hospital.
Public health updates suggest CENAR’s patient load is growing by 10 to 15 per cent a year, while its staffing is reported at only four specialist doctors and five nurses for the province’s entire public oncology caseload.
CENAR and the Indus unit deserve credit for doing difficult work with very little. But a system with one main public center, a few specialists and a rising caseload is not a cancer-care network. It is a few people holding back a flood.
For a family outside Quetta, each stage of treatment, from consultation to tests, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and follow-up, can mean hours or days on the road. It means finding transport, then affordable lodging in an unfamiliar city, and paying for both while the family’s earnings may have stopped.
The cost of cancer is therefore not only the hospital bill. It is lost wages, fuel, rent and the exhaustion of travelling while ill. Families can run out of money and strength long before they run out of will. In Balochistan, whether a patient gets timely treatment can depend on how far she lives from a city, and that should trouble all of us.
“A son of Balochistan with a plan”
It is in this context that I want to draw attention to Abdul Malik, a young man from the province whose passion is to build a dedicated cancer hospital in Quetta.
What sets Malik apart is not his résumé but his passion. The hospital is, for him, a personal mission rooted in the province where his own journey began, and he has already put action behind it.
He has already captured the interest of overseas supporters and donors who are eager to back the project. who chose to back the project as a good cause. That matters because it shows his idea has found believers well beyond Balochistan, and that people abroad are willing to invest in care for patients they may never meet.
Malik’s path is unusual for a young man from the province. By his account, he won the Balochistan junior and senior squash championships ten times, played for Pakistan’s Under-19 squad and then the national junior team, and won medals at the Asian Junior Championship. In the United States, He is 1st Pakistani to coach D1 National Highschool champions in 2026.
He went on to a master’s degree in accounting and finance at Cornell University and a career in investment banking. In August 2026 he passed Level I of the CFA Program and is working towards the full charter.
I mention these details because elite sport teaches patience: long, repetitive effort with no shortcuts, and the habit of coming back after a loss. A hospital project will test exactly those habits.
Malik has been candid that the hospital does not exist yet. Early support from overseas is a start, but it still needs partners, planning, further capital, equipment, specialists and a way to keep running after the opening ceremony. Anyone who has watched a promising health project stall knows that good intentions are the cheap part.
So this proposal should be examined, not simply cheered. Who will fund it? Who will staff it, given how scarce oncologists already are? How will it stay affordable for the patients it is meant to serve? These are fair questions, and the answers should be public.
But the need is not in doubt.
Balochistan has thousands of confirmed cancer cases, a thin network of dedicated facilities and a workforce stretched past its limits. Any serious effort to widen that network, whether public, private or philanthropic, deserves a hearing from provincial leaders, medical professionals and donors alike.
A hospital cannot be built by one man. But for a patient in Balochistan, specialised care closer to home would mean one less journey, one less burden and one more reason to hope.
