BRITAIN: The UK is experiencing the biggest reduction in deaths from the two most common cancers - lung and breast cancer - of any country in the world, two leading scientists said yesterday.
Statistics produced yesterday for the charity Cancer Research UK by Sir Richard Peto, of the clinical trials unit of Oxford University, and Sir Richard Doll, famous for his work on lung cancer in the 1950s, contradict the negative view of cancer-care in the UK.
According to the two scientists, deaths from all cancers are down by nearly 20 per cent in the last 10 years. In men, deaths peaked in the late 1960s and in women in the late 1980s.
Changing habits in cigarette smoking is by far the biggest factor behind the falling cancer rates. Lung cancer kills more people than any other cancer.
Since the 1970s, as more smokers have realised the peril of their habit and quit, there has been a steep downward trend in men's deaths - from over 400 per 100,000 in the 35- to 69-year-old age group to less than 300 per 100,000.
The UK was experiencing more tobacco-related deaths than most countries in the 1960s because smoking had taken such a hold. However, efforts to prevent people from smoking and help them quit started earlier and have been more consistent than elsewhere.
In France, death rates are rising and in Spain, where women have relatively recently started to smoke, a lung-cancer epidemic is predicted within a few decades.
Deaths from breast cancer are also sharply down in the UK because of a combination of earlier detection through screening and of the hormonal treatment Tamoxifen, which was developed in the UK and has been very successful in keeping women alive and well.
Prof Doll's and Prof Peto's statistics go against the commonly held assumption that the UK trails much of Europe and the US in cancer treatment. Prof Peto said those assumptions were based on "unintentionally misleading statistics", partly because other countries do not keep such accurate data on cancer deaths as the UK has done for many years.
Prof Peto pointed out that smoking killed as many people from other diseases as it did from lung and other forms of cancer.
"We have still got a lot of smokers and if they keep on, half of them will be killed," he said. They should know the basic statistics - 50 per cent of those who smoke will die of tobacco-related disease, and half of those will die in middle age.
The good news was that stopping smoking worked. Even those who quit at 50 could reduce the risk substantially, he added.
Although more young women are starting to smoke, the impact has not made its way yet into the mortality statistics and will not do so as long as they give up, preferably before 30, said the scientists.