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Here’s a brief thing. Brief? Ha! We’ll see. I’m back to thinking about the current Breast Screening Review. I wondered when it would be completed, so I went to the page about it on CR-UK’s website. It still said Spring/Summer 2012, as it always has. That’s fine. I sent them an email to ask if there was a more up-to-date estimate.

Then I noticed some info. has been updated. 

This was originally attached to the previous post, but I've cut it adrift to form a new one. It seems at least semi coherent - which is good enough for me in my patch of blogosphere. There's no disguising it though - it's still a stream of unsought and, I imagine, unappreciated advice to cancer charities.

Let’s start with this really big overarching far too iFAQ. How should the cancer charity sector develop its role in support, information and campaigning on behalf of elderly men and women, to both augment and challenge the current cancer policy agenda?

I know this is a bit old hat now, but bear with me. It gives a frame of reference. Chapter Six of the Cancer Reform Strategy (CRS) highlighted specific equality target groups who experience inequality and established the National Cancer Equality Initiative (NCEI) which still exists, to investigate and reduce inequalities in implementing the CRS.

How’s it going with old people and cancer then? Not terribly well, I respectfully suggest. Despite the magnitude of demographic upheaval, substantial engagement by single tumour cancer charities with the issues around cancer in old age isn’t obvious.

I’d like this to change please. Thank you.

There was another publication on the unintended consequences of mammography last week, so off I went to look at it. Ha! Bless those Scandewegians. Who knew they’d  turn out to be so much trouble on breast screening? Norwegians this time. It’s been Danes. They host the Nordic Cochrane Group in Copenhagen who stirred things up in the past, questioning just what on earth breast screening is doing to women.…..

We? I mean women, mostly; and people who work in cancer charities. That, in a nutshell, is my response to Lea Pool’s documentary Pink Ribbons Inc. shown in London as part of the recent Human Rights Watch Film Festival. 

I was at an interesting but somewhat passionless National Cancer Equalities Initiative (NCEI) event on 12 March, on oncology decision making in older age. It wasn’t a particularly revelatory set of results – the researchers showed ageist clinical decision making, by oncologists and haematologists.

Who'd have thought it?

I found the following on The Prostate Cancer Charity website, about a party marking the current Awareness Month. I’ve lifted it as posted, and added my own comments.

It is the usual muddle of half baked wishful thinking which manages to imply certainty and health advice, without actually containing any of either. You'll learn about their celebrity supporters and the fundraising, but any actual facts about prostate cancer come courtesy of me!