DID YOU KNOW? Prostate cancer is the third deadliest

The number of men dying from prostate cancer has been increasing owing to our ageing population.

And now it has overtaken breast cancer to become the third most deadly form of the disease in Britain.

In 2015, 11,819 men died from prostate cancer in the UK, compared with 11,442 women from breast cancer. But there’s no routine screening for it because of the lack of a single, reliable test.

Separately, research has found that Britain is still lagging behind comparable nations in the treatment of cancer. The study in The Lancet compared five-year survival rates for 18 types of cancer in 71 countries, and discovered that the UK fell in the bottom half for seven forms of the disease.

For pancreatic cancer, it came 47th out of 56 countries for which data was available. Britain made the top 10 for only two cancers – skin melanoma and childhood leukaemia.

“By any published metric, the UK is not doing well,” said the study’s lead author, Professor Michael Coleman of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine .