‘I AM LUCKY TO BE ALIVE’
As he urges more cancer screening, George Alagiah says...
ASIAN men and women owe it to their families to get tested for cancer.
That is the stark message from Britain’s top south Asian newsreader, George Alagiah. The BBC journalist, who was born in Sri Lanka, has lived with bowel cancer for nine years. He told Eastern Eye that he was “lucky to be alive”.
“Given what I know about the treatment, it is not fun. It is very, very challenging,” he said.
“I’ve had about five operations. We’re talking huge operations, the liver, the guts, the colon and so on.
“We’re not talking about keyhole surgery or anything like that, this is proper full-on surgery.
“The recovery that goes with that, the pain and then just the treatment itself – chemotherapy is, for the most part, a very, very blunt instrument.
“The side effects, the fatigue, the nausea, even things like your skin cracking and nails in your fingers and toes bleeding – you get to that point when you think this isn’t the cancer, but some of the side effects are physically debilitating.
“For people to think it through, [to say] ‘if I caught this early, especially with something like bowel cancer, it’s eminently treatable’,” Alagiah said.
“One of my surgeons used to call himself a glorified plumber.
“He said that if you caught it very early, when it’s maybe at the beginning of a tumour in your colon, it’s snip, snip at two ends, and join the two things and hopefully, you’ve got rid of it, and you may not even need chemotherapy.
“It’s when you allow it to develop, then not only are you risking death, but you’re also making it much more prolonged and difficult and challenging, not just for you, but the people you love.
“The people around you who are gonna have to support and care for you, it becomes a much, much, tougher job.”
The health secretary, Sajid Javid, backed Alagiah’s call for south Asian communities to get tested.
As Eastern Eye reported in March, Javid’s father died from bowel cancer after leaving it too late.
“It’s [bowel cancer] a horrible, deadly disease,” Javid told Eastern Eye.
“My own dad died about 10 years ago, and I often think that if he had taken the opportunity to get tested, spotted some of the early symptoms, taken some of the simple tests out there, maybe he would be alive today.
“I want to make sure that everyone out there knows about these tests that are easily done at home.
“Now, technology has come on. You can get a testing kit for bowel cancer – it couldn’t be easier. They really do work, and they save lives.
“Because we know enough about cancer that if you detect it early, then you could do something about it.”
Javid now wants south Asians to be screened so it can feed into his department’s 10-year cancer plan.
“To inform that [cancer plan], a couple
of months ago, I launched a call for evidence to hear from people across the UK, south Asians, whatever background they are, and to tell us about what more we can do to make our testing and other cancer treatments much more accessible,” said Javid.
“I haven’t had time yet to go through all those responses, but definitely there are suggestions about doing it in totally different ways.
“For example, I know from the data that Asian women, particularly those of Pakistani and Bangladeshi background, are less likely to go for screening for breast cancer.
“That must be down to some kind of cultural issue, and we need to then look at how we encourage them, to find other ways of bringing those tests to them.”
Doctors diagnosed that Alagiah had stage 4 terminal cancer in 2014. He told Eastern Eye he had no physical symptoms, and he did not think anything was wrong until he spotted blood in his stool during a skiing holiday. He immediately went to his GP.
“Without being rude, it is utterly ignorant to be in the 21st century, to have these tests available that pre-test for cancer and not to take them,” Alagiah said.
“I know there are fears about things like the vaccines. People have these worries, but what I’m trying to say is that the alternative is so much worse.
“And if you leave it too late, then it’s not just worse, it’s death.
“That’s a choice you face. A little test, which is not very pleasant to have to do, but anything is better than the possibility of death.
“I think there’s a lot of education needs doing to help people understand what these processes are. A lot of people are worried about going to the doctor, worried about medical establishments.
“But if I can, the message I would give is I have been very, very lucky and if you leave it as late as I did, there is no guarantee that you will make your ninth year, which is what I’m in now.
“The chances are, that’s the prospect you’re setting yourself up for if you don’t go and do these simple tests.”
The NHS is also urging south Asians to take part in the world’s largest multicancer screening trial. It is being run by Cancer Research UK and King’s College London Cancer Prevention Trials Unit in partnership with the NHS and healthcare company, GRAIL. They will be sending mobile clinics to Birmingham, Leicester, Bolton and other cities.
Researchers have told Eastern Eye that the procedure is “a simple blood test”. It works by finding chemical changes in fragments of genetic code called cellfree DNA, which leak from tumours into the person’s bloodstream.
“In the UK, we only have screening programmes for three types of cancer,” said Sir Harpal Kumar, president of GRAIL Europe.
“We have breast cancer screening, bowel cancer screening, and cervical cancer screening.
“But the vast majority of people, about four-fifths of all deaths from cancer, are not one of those three types.
“What we’re doing is working with the NHS to try a new technology, called the Galleri test, which is a blood test. From work that we’ve done in terms of clinical work already, we know it can detect more than 50 different types of cancer from that single blood sample.”
The research is particularly effective at finding cancers which are typically difficult to identify early, detecting 99.5 per cent of potential cases. These include head and neck, bowel, lung, pancreatic, and throat cancers.
“What we look at is very specific markers in their DNA,” Sir Harpal added. “These are very specific pieces of information that are aberrations, if you like, in the DNA, that give us an indication of whether someone is likely to have cancer or not.
“The markers that we look for are very specific to cancer. So, we don’t look at the entire genome, we don’t look at someone’s background genetics or anything like that, we look for these very specific markers.
“Through all the work that we’ve done up until now, it helps us to differentiate someone who is likely to have cancer from someone who is more likely to have cancer.” Figures show that Asians are not good in either getting screened or visiting their doctors until it is too late. Sir Harpal is urging so-called community leaders to stress the importance of screening and taking part in research to benefit their communities.
“If we make sure that Asians are very well represented in the trial, then we can be much more sure that the results will be applicable to Asians or not.
“And if they’re not, then we can do something about that.
“Our sense is that they will be applicable, but we can’t be sure about that, unless we get sufficient [numbers of] patients enrolled in the trial.”
Javid said one of his missions was to level up the racial inequalities which exist in the NHS.
He paid tribute to the work others are doing, especially community pharmacists, who gave vaccinations and advice during the pandemic.
“I’m very proud of our community pharmacists, they do a huge amount and
you’re right to point to the period over the pandemic, the past couple of years, where, especially with the vaccinations, they have been absolutely critical to this country,” he said.
“Going ahead, I do think absolutely, that all pharmacists are capable of and want to do a lot more to help with the nation’s health leads.
“I’m looking into that actively about what more we can do.
“But when it comes to testing for cancers, like bowel cancer, I think certainly in terms of these test kits, or even talking to some of their customers about giving them information around some of the symptoms and things, I think they can play a very valuable role.” ■ Next week Barnie Choudhury speaks to a cancer survivor who explains why south Asians need to get screened.