Cancer: The good news

Cancer is no longer the death sentence that it once was. Our most feared disease is turning into a condition that people live with, rather than die from, figures published yesterday show.

In the past 30 years, overall survival rates from cancer have doubled, thanks to better treatments, earlier diagnosis and greater public awareness of the warning symptoms.

Almost half of patients (46.2 per cent) diagnosed in 2000-01 were expected to live 10 years, compared with a quarter (23.6 per cent) of those diagnosed in 1971, according to the charity Cancer Research UK.

Ten-year survival is a benchmark of success in cancer treatment and is regarded as close to a cure.

The breakneck progress, that has accelerated in the past decade, is set to continue, experts predicted. Among 10 goals announced yesterday, Cancer Research UK set a target of 66 per cent overall five-year survival by 2020, up from 50 per cent in 2001.

However, Britain still trails Europe in terms of cancer survival, despite the recent improvement. The last European survey of cancer , Eurocare-3, published in 2003 showed British patients died sooner than in most other European countries.

Professor Michel Coleman, a cancer epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who calculated the latest figures, said cancer was still a "major public health problem" that would affect one in three people during their lifetimes.

"Survival rates for many cancers have been lower in the UK than in many comparable countries. The differences may be less when Eurocare-4 is published later this year - I am hopeful we may have caught up," he said.

Professor Mike Richards, the Government's national cancer director, said: "I await Eurocare-4 with interest. I am optimistic we will see a narrowing of the gap [in survival rates]. We have seen an acceleration in survival in the 90s [in the UK] and I have every hope that will be continued."

A key reason for Britain's past poor performance has been delays in diagnosing patients - hence their cancers were more advanced when treatment started - compared with other countries. But extra investment in the NHS since 2000 has boosted the number of cancer specialists and shortened waits for treatment. About 250,000 patients are treated for cancer in Britain each year and more than 99 per cent are now treated within the Government target of two months.

Professor Richards admitted that uptake of new cancer drugs was slower in Britain than in other countries, as highlighted in a report by the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, last week. Most of the drugs had been approved for use by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice) and efforts had been made to speed its assessment process. But he added: "Drugs are only one part of the answer."

Early detection of cancer, greater use of specialist surgery, screening programmes to detect cancer at an earlier stage and advances in chemotherapy and radiotherapy have all helped to increase survival rates.