CANCER accounts for 7,500 deaths a year, a quarter of all fatalities in Ireland, the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan, said last night as he introduced a Bill on the implementation of the national cancer screening programme.
The Health (Provision of Information) Bill is aimed at complying with the current legislation on data protection. The State needed to establish population registers, to have the names and addresses of women in the target age groups so that they could be invited for breast and cervical screening, the Minister said.
Fianna Fail's health spokesman, Mr Brian Cowen, questioned the necessity of the legislation. He pointed to the concern expressed by the Data Protection Commissioner that the "extended use of the RSI numbers in the interests of data sharing and data matching by public authorities was the single greatest challenge facing data protection at present".
Ms Helen Keogh (PD, Dun Laoghaire) said "that many women are going to be concerned about giving their details". They would not wish people to be aware of what they were suffering from. She added that "we have to balance the needs of the cancer register with the need for privacy of women: women should not feel that they have to reveal intimate information if they do not wish to".
The Minister said the Bill would extend date protection provisions to other cancer-screening programmes.