Daily Mail

LET’S SAVE 7,000 LIVES A YEAR

That’s what could be achieved if prostate received the same funding as breast cancer

- By Ben Spencer, Xantha Leatham and Sophie Borland

BOOSTING prostate cancer funding to match cash for breast cancer could save the lives of 7,000 men a year.

Just £290,000 a week – half the wage of the country’s top-paid footballer – would bring prostate funds in line with breast cancer and dramatical­ly improve survival rates, experts say.

Prostate Cancer UK last night said a £15million annual increase could lead to a national screening programme within five years, vastly better drugs and improved prevention.

The charity was backed by a string of MPs after official figures yesterday revealed prostate

cancer is now a bigger killer than breast cancer for the first time. They showed 11,800 men a year are dying of the disease in Britain, compared with 11,400 women killed by breast cancer. The gap is set to widen, with annual prostate deaths projected to be 14,500 by 2026.

experts blamed a gulf in funding, with prostate cancer receiving half the research money of breast cancer over the past 15 years.

The daily Mail has fought for nearly 20 years to raise prostate cancer’s profile. Care has leapt forwards since the Mail’s campaign was launched in 1999, but progress has been slow compared with advances on breast cancer.

deaths from breast cancer in Britain have dropped by 1,500 since 1999, in which time prostate cancer deaths have risen by 2,400.

While breast screening is routine, prostate tests are notoriousl­y inaccurate and there is no national screening programme. Breast cancer treatments are ten to 20 years more advanced than those for prostate cancer.

Angela Culhane, of Prostate Cancer UK, said: ‘We’re on the brink of the scientific breakthrou­ghs needed to make a huge difference.’

She believes an extra £120million over the next eight years – raising annual funding from £25million to the £40million received by breast cancer – would bring current research programmes from lab benches into hospitals.

The extra cash required would represent less than half of Manchester United footballer Alexis Sanchez’s salary. He reportedly earns £600,000 a week, while many other players earn around £290,000 – or £15million a year.

experts claimed the NHS was sitting on millions of pounds of government funding, which it was refusing to spend until hospitals met cancer waiting targets. They said if hospitals were given the extra money they could treat more patients and waiting times would fall. Tory MP John Baron, of the all-party parliament­ary group on cancer, said: ‘NHS england is presently sitting on millions of pounds of cancer transforma­tion funding, some of which could be used to help prostate cancer patients … I am shortly meeting with the Prime Minister to press for this funding to be released, as frontline services need it now.’

NHS england insisted the full funds are due to be released in stages and will include additional money for prostate cancer.

Liberal democrat leader Vince Cable said: ‘We welcome calls to improve detection and treatment of prostate cancer, which has been long underfunde­d.’

Martin Tod, of the Men’s Health Forum, believes the lack of funding is partly caused by a ‘fatalism’ surroundin­g male health. ‘There is an idea that men are bound to die earlier … that they drink, they smoke, they get into fights, so of course they die earlier,’ he said. ‘That whole idea has led to a fatalism, an idea that there is little you can do for men’s health.’

Ms Culhane said a key target is to create a national screening programme to replace the current option – unreliable PSA blood tests and biopsies. Accurate screening could transform survival because men diagnosed at a late stage have just a 22 per cent chance of surviving ten years, compared with 98 per cent if they are diagnosed early.

Prostate Cancer UK is funding the creation of a new prostate test which they want to present to the National Screening Committee within five years, involving a far better genetic blood test, followed by a high-tech MRI scan. But far more trials need to be done. And there are currently only a third of the £ 1million MRI scanners required, and a 9 per cent shortage of radiologis­ts.

Scientists believe new targeted drugs, like those revolution­ising ovarian cancer, could transform prostate care, but they still need to be fully tested.

Louise de Winter, of the Urology Foundation, said: ‘We have come a long way in raising awareness but the expenditur­e needs to also catch up.’

Professor Hardev Pandha, oncologist at Surrey University, said: ‘There is an urgent need to find new and more accurate tests.’

An NHS england spokesman said: ‘It is simply untrue to suggest the NHS is sitting on money which could be spent on cancer … There is a clear, two-year plan of investment to transform cancer care, including prioritisi­ng prostate cancer, which will see £200million extra funding go into care by March 2019.’ He added that it is working with experts to bring the latest research into practice.

Some years ago when I was writing my will, I told a surgeon friend who specialise­s in cancer that I was planning to leave something to breast cancer research.

He informed me, rather brutally, there were other cancers that claimed huge numbers of lives, but were ignored because they weren’t ‘fashionabl­e’.

I should think about leaving money to research into one of these, he added — prostate cancer, for example. He called it the ‘Cinderella cancer’ — ignored, swept under the counter by society.

After all, it only affected men. They never went to the doctor and were too embarrasse­d to talk about it anyway.

Yesterday, official statistics confirmed what he said: prostate has now become a bigger killer than breast cancer. And while breast cancer deaths are falling, the toll for prostate cancer victims is continuing to climb.

As the mail explained yesterday, a major reason for this is that funding for prostate cancer research has been less than half of that for breast cancer since 2002.

The fact is all the high- profile campaigns seem to be about women’s cancers. Whenever you turn on the radio, women are discussing breast cancer awareness month, or pink ribbons against breast cancer, or cervical cancer awareness week.

And while these campaigns deserve huge support — for, make no mistake, they have saved many, many lives — their success highlights the dire need for better help for men’s cancers.

Research has shown that more men get cancer than women, and that more boys get cancer than girls.

Two decades ago, the mail’s Dying of embarrassm­ent campaign did wonders by drawing attention to the ‘taboo’ of prostate cancer and raising £1 million to help tackle it. other campaigns have helped, too. But these latest figures show there is so much more to be done.

Not a day goes by when we aren’t told how unfairly women are being treated — whether it concerns the Harvey Weinstein scandal or the row over BBC pay.

But here the opposite is the case. Where cancer is concerned, men are considered second- class citizens. And we women should be just as angry about that as the men.

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