By Tulip Mazumdar Global health reporter
Ugandan woman Betty Naiga: 'My family hate looking at me and my tumour'
Lack of access to pain relief for dying patients is a "public health emergency", say experts.
Figures suggest almost 18 million people - mainly in developing countries - died in unnecessary pain in 2012.
In Ethiopia, there are reports of cancer patients throwing themselves in front of trucks to escape pain.
The Worldwide Palliative Care Alliance says part of the problem is the refusal of governments to give patients access to painkillers such as morphine.
It says restrictions are in place because of exaggerated fears about the risk of addiction.
Last month, health officials from almost 200 countries met at the UN and pledged to make palliative care a higher priority.
This is the first time the specialty has been recognised in this way and championed by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Nestled in a banana plantation in a tiny village in Wakiso district in central Uganda, Betty Naiga, 48, lies on a thin mattress on the floor of her small yellow hut.
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I had given up on life”
Betty Naiga Cancer patient
She was diagnosed with breast cancer two years ago.
She couldn't afford treatment and the tumour grew to the size of a football.
"The pain was too much before," she said.
"I would not sleep. I would not do anything. It was excruciating. I had given up on life. I wished I was dead."
Betty lay in agony for a year, feeling lost and abandoned by her family. Until she was found by a community volunteer called Allen.
Allen is one of hundreds of volunteers trained by the country's leading palliative care provider, Hospice Africa Uganda, to go out and find people like Betty suffering in silence.
Torture
After the hospice got involved with her care, Betty was given access to free chemotherapy and the desperately needed powerful painkiller morphine.
"My life has changed enormously since getting treatment. The medicines help ease my suffering," she said.
Uganda is leading the way in Africa in terms of palliative care. The country makes its own oral morphine using a simple and inexpensive mix of morphine powder and water.
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