Cancer under control by 2025
Published: November 18, 2005
It meant individuals could be told the steps that they must take to help prevent cancer if they were at an increased genetic risk, for example, by stopping smoking.
However, cancer will still pose a significant health problem for most alive today, he added.
“We will not eliminate cancer in the next 25 years or the next 50 years.
“That is not possible. Even if everyone stopped smoking tomorrow there would still be cancer in 2025,” he said. [Thank You for Smoking]
The Government’s cancer tsar, Professor Mike Richards, said the reason cancer incidence continued to rise was because the population was ageing, so more people were living to a time when they were most at risk.
He said: “One in four people is dying of cancer and that is likely to go on for some while longer.
“If you look at the death rate for cancer it is going down, but not fast enough.”
He said smoking and a combination of unhealthy diet, obesity and inactivity were the leading causes of preventable cancer.
He said the smoking ban in the majority of enclosed public places planned for England by summer 2007 was a step forward in helping many quit and cutting passive smoking.
But he wanted a total ban, he said, rather than the planned exemptions for non-food pubs and private members’ clubs.
Professor Richards added: “I am absolutely convinced that over time we will get a full ban because it makes sense.”
The Government should not waste money on private healthcare companies which are more expensive than the NHS “purely for the sake” of involving the independent sector, says the British Medical Association.
Patient services, education, training and research must not be harmed as a result, it said in a submission on proposed reforms.
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