🇩🇿 Cancer in Algeria

The GLOBOCAN 2024 fact sheet gives 17,110 breast cancers (6,237 deaths), 9,120 colorectal (3,921 deaths), 5,503 lung (4,450 deaths), 3,615 prostate and 3,552 thyroid cancers; cervical cancer is fourth in women at 1,792 cases. In men the leading cancers by cases are colorectum (4,868), lung (4,709), prostate (3,615), bladder (3,040) and stomach (1,800); in women breast (17,110, 42.1% of women's cancers), colorectum (4,252), thyroid (2,956), cervix (1,792) and ovary (1,387). The risk of developing a cancer before age 75 is 15.3% for men and 16.8% for women, and IARC estimates 184,478 people living within five years of a diagnosis. Registry figures tell a similar story with Algerian detail: the 2015 to 2019 national plan reported a median age of 47 for breast cancer, meaning half of breast cancers occurred before that age, and the Algiers registry found the median age at diagnosis in 2022 was 52 for breast cancer and 56 for all cancers in women, against 65 in men.

The Plan National Cancer 2015 to 2019 counted 14 registries covering close to 40% of the population, with Algiers and Sétif voting members of the International Association of Cancer Registries and six others (Annaba, Batna, Constantine, Mascara, Oran and Sidi Bel Abbès) associate members, and committed to implementing ministerial order No. 22 of 18 February 2014 on population cancer registries in every wilaya. The national public health institute (INSP) dates the wilaya registries and their three regional networks to 2015, when the first national indicators were produced. Its Algiers registry, which covered 3.9 million people (8.6% of Algerians) in 2022, collects cases actively from public and private laboratories, cancer centres and hospitals and met the IARC quality criteria in 2022, apart from the share of men's cases known only from a death certificate (6.5% against a limit of 3%). A national registry of cancers in children and adolescents has run since 2018. At the network's meeting on 28 October 2025 the health minister announced work to link registries electronically to hospitals and laboratories.

Article 13 of Law No. 18-11 of 2 July 2018 on health states that the state ensures free care (la gratuité des soins) and guarantees access to it for all citizens throughout the national territory, providing the means of diagnosis, treatment and hospitalisation in all public health structures. Free care was instituted by a presidential ordinance that the 2015 to 2019 national cancer plan places in the period 1973 to 1986. Under articles 300 and 330 of the 2018 law, public hospitals are funded from the state budget, from social security contributions made under contracts with the Ministry of Health, and from other receipts. The plan also records two special accounts for cancer: the fund for emergencies and medical care created in 2002, whose receipts are meant partly for tobacco prevention and tobacco-related illness, which had a balance of about 65.9 billion dinars on 23 October 2014 with no anti-smoking spending yet made, and the cancer control fund created by the 2011 finance law, which pays for screening, training, mobile breast screening units and radiotherapy spare parts. In February 2026 the health minister said radiotherapy maintenance is paid from this cancer account. On 3 May 2026 the President told the Council of Ministers that Algeria provides free care and treatment.

Decree No. 84-27 of 11 February 1984, applying the 1983 social insurance law, sets reimbursement at 100% of regulated tariffs for the affections in its article 5, which include the long-term illnesses of article 21: tuberculosis, serious psychiatric illness, cancers (les maladies cancéreuses), blood diseases (les hémopathies), malignant hypertension and listed heart, vascular and neurological diseases, among others. The CNAS, the fund for salaried workers, explains that its Chifa card carries the patient's entitlement and treatment, and that since 3 February 2013 the third-party payment system works in contracted pharmacies in every wilaya: a chronically ill patient can collect a specific treatment prescribed for up to three months without paying. Two charges can remain: the 20% co-payment for patients covered at 80%, waived for members of a contracted mutual fund, and the difference when a medicine's price is above its reference tariff. Medicines given in public hospitals are bought centrally by the hospital purchasing body described below. At a ministry meeting on 22 April 2025 a CNAS director said social security was preparing the legal framework to pay, through third-party payment, for radiotherapy in private clinics for children with cancer.

The Plan National Cancer 2015 to 2019 records that a 2012 amendment to the PCH's 1994 founding decree let it act as a central purchasing body with its own credits, and that a ministerial order of 6 February 2013 named the cancer plan among the national programmes for which the PCH receives a subsidy to buy medicines. That subsidy rose from 27 billion dinars in 2012 to 50 billion in 2015. Purchases of cancer medicines for oncology and haematology averaged more than 30 billion dinars a year, and oncology purchases in 2014 were 21 billion dinars, more than half for targeted therapy. The plan put its own five-year budget at 178.674 billion dinars, including 66 billion for investment already under way, 2.166 billion for prevention and 1.907 billion for research. A 2025 IHE report commissioned and funded by MSD states that hospital medicines are put on the PCH's list by the Ministry of Health while pharmacy medicines are reimbursed by the health insurance funds, and that 47% of the PCH budget in 2023 went on cancer medicines; OnCo could not check the 47% against a PCH document. In May 2026 the President asked for a system to monitor the availability and distribution of cancer medicines.

The ANPP was created by article 223 of the 2018 health law; ordinance No. 20-02 of 30 August 2020 moved it from the Ministry of Health to the Ministry of Pharmaceutical Industry. Executive decree No. 20-325 of 22 November 2020 requires a company to file a pre-submission request first, on which the registration commission gives its opinion within 30 days; the company then has a year to file a dossier in the international Common Technical Document format. The agency checks admissibility within 8 days and must decide, after the commission's opinion, within 150 days of admissibility, a period its director general can exceptionally extend by up to 90 days, with the clock stopped while information is requested. Article 19 requires an imported product to be registered and marketed in its country of origin when the application is filed, with exceptions set by a 2021 order. A registration lasts five years. The agency can consult committees of clinical experts organised by therapeutic class, one of whose representatives sits on the commission, and experts and members must sign declarations that they have no conflict of interest. The agency also issues the price certificate after an interministerial economic committee sets the price.

Executive decree No. 21-53 of 31 January 2021 lets the minister of pharmaceutical industry grant a temporary authorisation for an unregistered medicine prescribed for a serious illness with no equivalent treatment in Algeria and proven therapeutic usefulness, or at the health minister's request for public health reasons. The ANPP must give its opinion within eight working days, the authorisation names the indication, the manufacturer and the price, and it lasts no more than a year, renewable, possibly followed by a commitment to register. On 15 June 2025 the ministry and the ANPP opened a self-assessment workshop with World Health Organization experts using the WHO's global benchmarking method, and on 2 September 2025 the ministers of pharmaceutical industry and health reviewed progress towards maturity level 3 certification, which the pharmaceutical industry minister said would help medicines made in Algeria reach international markets. In November 2025 the ANPP's director general presented regulatory reliance, using the assessments of recognised regulators while keeping national decisions, at an African ministerial conference on local production of medicines in Algiers.

The IHE cancer dashboard for Algeria (September 2025), written by the Swedish Institute for Health Economics, commissioned and funded by MSD and validated by Algerian oncologists, compared the European Medicines Agency's new cancer medicines of 2015 to 2020 with Algeria's national nomenclature of pharmaceutical products of March 2025: 16 of 60 (27%) were registered, 15 more were under registration and 29 had not been submitted. The share fell with the year of European approval: 5 of 11 from 2015, 6 of 10 from 2016, 3 of 11 from 2017, 1 of 11 from 2018, none of 7 from 2019 and 1 of 10 from 2020. The report states that every medicine with a marketing authorisation in Algeria is also reimbursed, either on the PCH hospital list or by health insurance for pharmacy medicines. Its Algerian approval dates came from the ANPP by personal communication, so OnCo cannot check them against a public list. A gap between European and Algerian approval does not by itself mean a patient cannot get a medicine, since temporary authorisations exist for serious illness.

The 2015 to 2019 national plan described breast screening initiatives by the CNAS, associations and others as dispersed and ineffective, recommended an organised programme with a validated national protocol, quality standards and identification of women to invite from census or population registers, and put the average cost of a screening examination at about 15,000 dinars. It noted that 39.4% of breast cancers were in women aged 40 to 49. In May 2026 the secretary general of the national federation of cancer patients' associations, Hamida Kettab, named the absence of a structured national screening programme as the main challenge and described the Biskra pilot, with double reading by teleradiology with the Centre Pierre et Marie Curie in Algiers and biopsy on site. For colorectal cancer, the IHE dashboard (commissioned and funded by MSD) reports pilots in Béjaïa, Annaba and Batna from 2017; in Béjaïa, 30% of a target population of 10,000 people aged 50 to 74 took an immunochemical stool test, 7.2% tested positive and 17 cancers were found. The 2015 plan judged PSA testing for mass prostate screening ineffective.

The 2015 to 2019 national plan records that Algeria chose in 1997, with the World Health Organization and the UN Population Fund, a national plan for cervical screening by cytology, with annual training of screeners and colposcopists at the INSP's reference laboratory, and that the 2001 national strategy integrated screening into primary care with units across the then 48 wilayas. An objective evaluation in 2014 found the results below the objectives set, and the plan proposed centralising HPV DNA testing in the three structures with the necessary platforms. The ministerial order of 28 April 2026, published in the Journal officiel No. 36 of 17 May 2026, completes the 2018 compulsory vaccination schedule with an anti-human papillomavirus vaccine at 11 to 13 years; the order does not specify girls or boys. In February 2026 the president of the national cancer commission had said Algeria planned to introduce the vaccine during 2026. OnCo found no recent national figure for cervical screening coverage from an Algerian source.

The CPMC was inaugurated on 16 November 1959 with 320 beds and a cobalt unit, became the national cancer centre after independence and reports more than 450 beds and more than 50,000 patients a year today. The 2015 to 2019 plan described radiotherapy as delivered in 11 anti-cancer centres with the status of specialised hospital establishments, plus two private clinics, and listed the CPMC, Blida, Oran (Messerghine and the university hospital), Constantine, the army's central hospital, Ouargla, Sétif and Batna, with 15 more centres planned for 2015 to 2018. On 22 April 2025 the health minister said there were 45 linear accelerators in the public sector and 13 in the private sector, with four more about to start and 86 expected by early 2026, and 133 chemotherapy centres. In February 2026 the health minister, Mohamed Seddik Ait Messaoudene, told parliament that 25 new radiotherapy services would open and that five specialised cancer hospitals in Chlef, Tiaret, Béjaïa and Oran were nearly complete. In May 2026 the President asked for a study of an oncology hospital in every wilaya.

The 2015 to 2019 national plan cites the INSP's national survey of 31,000 cancers registered in 2002: two thirds were diagnosed at invasive or metastatic stages, close to 40% of patients were not found in the treatment pathway, only a third received a complete treatment protocol, and the average wait for a course of radiotherapy was six months. The plan judged diagnosis and treatment generally satisfactory apart from radiotherapy appointment times, and its action 1.8, to shorten them, called for equipping new centres, restoring lost capacity and setting timetables. On 5 May 2026 Hamida Kettab of the national federation of cancer patients' associations said waits in Algiers, Blida, Tizi Ouzou and Constantine ran from five to six months and up to a year at some centres such as the CPMC, blamed recurrent breakdowns and maintenance, and said patients were often sent to Adrar, Béchar or El Oued, where waits were sometimes 15 days to a month. These are an association's figures, not measured national waiting times, which OnCo did not find. In February 2026 the health minister described a digital platform for radiotherapy appointments and funding for preventive maintenance.

Presidential decree No. 24-65 of 3 February 2024 created the Commission nationale de prévention et de lutte contre le cancer as a permanent body to propose the national strategy, coordinate and evaluate the national plan for cancer care, strengthen early detection with the ministries of defence, health, higher education, pharmaceutical industry and labour and social security, encourage research, and propose mechanisms to prevent shortages of cancer medicines and devices. Its six members serve four years, renewable once. The commission held national meetings (assises) in May 2025, with seven workshops on Saturday 3 May on prevention, screening, diagnosis, the patient pathway, medicines and equipment, financing and governance, and training and research. On 3 May 2026 the Council of Ministers examined the strategy to 2035; the President asked for a national approach based on prevention, early detection and effective treatment, a study of an oncology hospital in each wilaya, and monitoring of the availability of cancer medicines. The strategy document itself had not been published when this page was checked. Algerian press and the IHE report name Professor Adda Bounedjar as the commission's president.

OnCo's graph holds ClinicalTrials.gov participation snapshots for its trials, and none lists Algeria; that reflects the trials in OnCo's records, not every study registered, so the ClinicalTrials.gov search below is the place to look. OpenAlex, counting works whose primary topic is oncology and counting a paper for every country among its authors' affiliations, gives Algeria 74 works in 2021, 79 in 2022, 98 in 2023, 77 in 2024 and 109 in 2025, 437 in total, of which 261 are open access and 8 highly cited. The Sétif registry's 1986 to 2010 data show incidence rising by 2.5% a year in men and 3.7% in women from 1996 to 2010. The 2015 to 2019 national plan budgeted 1.907 billion dinars for research. A 2025 IHE report commissioned by MSD recommends encouraging oncology trials to widen access to new treatments, and the president of the national cancer commission said in February 2026 that more than 60% of scientific research in the health sector concerns cancers.

insp.dz timed out on every request. The Internet Archive held the Algiers registry report for 2022 and the children's registry bulletin for 2022, both read in full; the national network's own report on 2023 data was not found, so its total of 56,319 is the INSP director general's figure as Radio Algérienne reported it on 28 October 2025. The Centre network's bulletins for 2017 are archived but were not read for this page. The health minister's breast and prostate figures from the network's meeting in October 2026 come from a press report that does not state the year they cover. No national completeness estimate, no national mortality figures from the registries and no Algerian population-based survival figures were found; CONCORD-3 survival estimates quoted in the IHE report are not used here.

The ANPP publishes the decrees and orders that govern registration but no median approval time, annual report of the registration commission or searchable register of cancer medicines with dates was found; the decree requires the commission to write an annual report to the director general, but none was found online. The national nomenclature of pharmaceutical products that the IHE report used was not located. A press-reported ministerial list of locally made medicines that may not be imported, published in 2015, could not be checked in the Journal officiel and is not used. Whether a registered medicine is on the PCH hospital list and in stock at a given centre is a separate question this page cannot answer medicine by medicine.

pch.dz did not answer and its archived pages returned a firewall rejection, so the PCH record rests on the 2015 to 2019 plan and the IHE report. cnas.dz did not answer; its Chifa pages were read from Internet Archive copies of 2018, and the list of long-term illnesses covered at 100% is quoted from decree 84-27 itself, read by optical character recognition of the scanned 1984 Journal officiel. The 2015 to 2019 plan was read from the World Health Organization's repository copy, and no evaluation of the plan by an Algerian body was read. The equipment counts in the IHE report (67 radiotherapy units in December 2024) are personal communications and are not used. The decree creating the cancer commission does not name its members, so the president's name is from press and the IHE report.