Over at Cancer Research UK’s science update blog, Nick Clegg asnwers questions about the Liberal Democrats plan to do to help beat cancer. Here’s an excerpt:
Britain’s cancer survival rates are worse than many of our European neighbours – what are the Liberal Democrats planning to do to tackle this?
Nick Clegg – Early detection is key. It simply doesn’t make sense for people to be turned away from screening programmes because they’re thought to be too old or too young, so we’d scrap age limits on screening for a start. And we need to get more people to go and get screened in the first place, by getting the message out to everyone that the best way to beat cancer is to catch it early.
We know that if cancer is detected earlier, treatment is often simpler and more likely to be effective. What will you do to make sure cancer is diagnosed earlier?
NC – … If we want to increase early diagnosis, we also need to look at what’s working round the country, and then roll those practices out to other places. For example, there’s a great programme in Doncaster which encourages people with persistent coughs to visit their doctor to ask for an x-ray. It’s led to more cases of lung cancer being diagnosed, with treatment being made available earlier. That’s the kind of scheme we need to see more of.
You can read Nick’s Q&A with Cancer Research UK in full here.
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2 Comments
Someone needs to educate Nick as to the statistics of testing for low probability events. There is literally no point screening low-risk candidates for cancer, since the number of false positives will outweigh the number of true positives by orders of magnitude. Ben Goldacre explains, and Evan Harris gets it too.
Screening should also be subject to the same cost-benefit analysis as any other public medical programme. I’m not impressed by this.