THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR

PROFESSOR KAROL SIKORA CMO of Rutherford Cancer Centres and Former Director of WHO Cancer Programme

SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that has won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.

POLITICIANS like to quote statistics. I see more MPs tweeting about how many people have been vaccinated than about the cancer crisis in the pandemic. They just don’t want to talk about it. So let’s put aside the Covid data and look at some numbers surrounding cancer.

In 2020, around 40,000 fewer people started cancer treatment across the UK.

Untreated cancer is lethal. It will still be developing in these people and sadly many of them will lose their lives from the delays. Where’s the urgent plan to find them? From March last year to January, there were around 348,000 fewer people urgently referred for suspected cancer. We have not grasped the scale of the crisis.

Scary

And unfortunately these numbers will be even worse now as the situation has developed since.

If we catch cancer at the earliest point, 90 per cent plus will live for many years.

This falls to well below 20 per cent for later stages. This can happen over a matter of months, it doesn’t always take years. Some scary numbers I know.

And as we’re seeing at Rutherford, my cancer centre network, the people who are presenting are doing so at a later stage than we would normally expect.

So not only do we have thousands of missing patients, the ones coming to get checked are facing more complications.

So next time you see an MP tweet about how many were vaccinated yesterday, politely ask them how many people have missed their cancer diagnosis.

We need to hear more about it.