FactCheck: is Britain too slow?

The background

Last year the Conservative Party Conference was full of pictures of Gordon Brown holding a big pair of scissors. 'Stop Brown's NHS cuts', was the slogan.

Health is much lower on the agenda this year, with today's headlines focusing strongly on tax. But Andrew Lansley did win a few column inches with his claims about cancer.

The picture is grim, he said: "It is a disgrace that our survival rates from cancer are so far below those in Europe."

But are they? And is the prescription he recommends - faster access to cancer drugs - the right one?

The analysis

The latest data on cancer survival comes from the Eurocare study, a massive pan-European exercise to compare survival rates.

Survival for many cancers is not nearly as bad as Lansley says it is; the UK is just about above average for testicular cancer, and for melanomas (skin cancer) every part of the UK except Wales is above the European average.

But for many cancers, including lung, colon and rectum, prostate, ovary and breast, survival rates are below the European average.

There has, however, been some improvement. Professor Michel Coleman, an epidemiologist from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and one of the academics leading the Eurocare study, told FactCheck that "The Eurocare 4 data did show some improvement relative to the European average."

And, more importantly, things may well have got better since the last set of data came out. One of the problems with measuring people's survival five years after being diagnosed with cancer is that you have to wait five years for the results.

Although the latest Eurocare data was published this year, it only measures cases diagnosed up to 2002.

This is two years after the implementation of the government's NHS Cancer Plan, launched in 2000, and far too early to pick up the impact of that programme.

Meanwhile, there are socio-economic factors which hold the UK back: people who are poor, who smoke or are obese are more likely to contract cancer and less likely to survive it, and this is one of the reasons why the UK lags the best countries in Europe, such as the Scandinavian nations.

"There are socioeconomic factors in survival, with the poor generally doing worse than the rich," says Professor Coleman.

"If it were possible to eliminate these inequalities then the gap in survival between Britain and the European average would drop by a half or more."

Wrong prescription

Most importantly, what about the pledge Andrew Lansley makes about cancer drugs - that they're essential to taking Britain's cancer rates closer to the European average?

Herceptin and other smart cancer drugs have been at the centre of high-profile rows in the past few years, with groups of sufferers campaigining for earlier access to these expensive treatments, and the NHS medicines watchdog NICE attacked for its slow approval.

But Lansley's speech overstates the importance of the role of cancer drugs in cutting death rates from cancer. Though they may play a big role in a small number of individual cases, they play a much smaller role in the overall public health picture.

"Early detection and rapid access to optimal surgery and radiotherapy play at least as important a role in good therapy, however useful those drugs may be in individual cases," says Professor Coleman.

Lansley does mention this in his speech. He calls for "a new cancer strategy promoting prevention, awareness of symptoms, early diagnosis and rapid treatment".

The government would argue that they are already doing this in the NHS Cancer Plan, but that the inevitable delays in measuring survival mean that the results haven't shown up yet.

FactCheck rating: 3

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Every time a FactCheck article is published we'll give it a rating from zero to five.

The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.

In the unlikely event that we award a 5 out of 5, our factcheckers have concluded that the claim under examination has absolutely no basis in fact.

Source

EUROCARE-4 data on cancer survival in Europe; Lancet Oncology, 21 August 2007.

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