Although British citizens have excellent access to medical care, the country lags behind other countries when it comes to cancer survival rates according to a very large study.

The Eurocare-4 study looked at 2.7 million cancer patients diagnosed between 1995 and 1999. Not only is that number statistically significant, it covered patients in 23 European countries.

Only 47 per cent of people in Britain who get the disease are alive after five years, compared with the European average of about 50 per cent.

Sufferers in the UK have a similar chance of recovering as those in the Eastern Europe, where money spent on healthcare is much lower, the figures show.

The British Government spends up to 1,500 pounds a person on healthcare — three times as much as the 500 pounds spent in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Poland.

More than 150,000 people die from cancer in Britain every year. The biggest killers are cancers of the lung, bowel, breast and prostate.

The results showed that Britain did in fact have below-average five-year cancer survival rates among the eight most common cancers. This seems to signal that the UK Department of Health’s cancer plan has in fact failed miserably.

“So has the cancer plan worked? The short answer is seemingly no,” an editorial in the journal ‘The Lancet’, which published the figures today, said.

A new technique has been developed at Singapore’s National University Hospital to detect cancer in its earliest stages, a team of researchers said on Saturday.

Called an “optical biopsy,” the technique can detect so-called pre-cancers - collections of a few hundred malignant cells lurking among millions of healthy cells - that usually fly under the radar of standard cancer screenings.  

By using near-infrared fluorescence imaging, doctors may spot cancer risk before any physical signs appear.

Read the rest of this entry »