London - Around one million people are alive in Britain having been successfully treated for cancer over the past decade, a leading cancer charity has said. The Cancer Research Campaign said survivors owed their lives to better treatments, new drugs and early awareness and detection of the disease. Once treated most were no more likely to develop the disease again than their neighbours or friends, it said.
The campaign's director-general, Mr Gordon McVie, said: "We are now able to cure 65 per cent of Britain's children who develop cancer, 90 per cent of the young men who are diagnosed with testicular cancer and six out of every 10 women with breast cancer." However Mr McVie, in the charity's end of year report, said tens of thousands of premature deaths could still be saved if people could be persuaded of "the importance diet plays, how the sun can harm us and how cigarettes are potentially death in a packet."