Cancer (other)

The New Year began with a BBC story about inequity in cancer research spend. Whilst reading it I chewed on my own sofa.

CR-UK will be pleased. Someone else’s woeful polling has caught my eye. Macmillan Cancer Support are now at it. On September 7 Macmillan announced that the British public are more ignorant than the even most exasperated cancer charities had previously supposed. British kids are ignorant too!

Today’s the day I rush up to Barclays and jab my mighty right forefinger in their corporate rib cage and bellow “Oi! Barclays! No! What are you thinking?”

Apart from ‘ooo….. money’ and ‘cooo….. profit’ that is?

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?

NICE has said no to Abiraterone. Don't rail at NICE. At least, not only at them. They follow rules and those rules restrict NICE's remit.

There are several assumptions in that header. The least problematic being is there a need to increase cancer research in rare cancers?  As people are dying that’s certainly a ‘yes’ in all cancers and particularly in the subset of ‘rare’.

My wobbly human rights slant pops up at the end, rather than being the centre of the story.

British breast cancer charities are all, as far as I can tell, in favour of breast screening. This will be for two reasons. One is that they are genuinely totally convinced of the value of it and that the benefits for all woman far outweigh any risks. The second reason is more intangible – screening’s usefulness as a ‘Call to Action’ and its symbolic strength as a sign of engagement with breast cancer awareness.

And here's more - on the CR-UK poll on fear and cancer mentioned in the similarly title post just below, numbered 1.

This time CR-UK's Poll missed out the options for us British to be frightened of terrorism, car accidents, murder and plane crashes - alternatives used previously in these ‘Top of the Shocks’ polls. Instead, they stuck a possibly random selection of cancers into the mix - breast, bowel, lung, prostate, malignant melanoma, cervical, ovarian, pancreatic, oesophageal, leukaemia, brain, and testicular.

CR-UK has released some non-riot news into August – some polling yet again, on  the unfortunate British and their ‘fear of cancer’. I’ve been here twice before, just like CR-UK, in a couple of posts from 2010.