Cancer survivor Lynn Faulds Wood: I urge you to have the five-minute bowel test
Lynn Faulds Wood, who was given a 34 per cent survival chance 20 years ago, applauds the Government for its screening initiative
Twenty years ago, I was presenter of the BBC’s primetime investigative series Watchdog, married to my co-presenter John Stapleton and with a toddler son, Nicholas.
Life was good. I had never heard of the second-biggest cancer killer in the country - but it was growing dangerously inside me.
When I went to my then GP surgery with what I thought was just a bit of rectal bleeding, I was told it was ‘nothing to worry about at your age, probably piles’.
I didn’t worry, but something made me go back to a different GP months later when the subtle symptom continued. It was almost a year before I was finally diagnosed - to my complete shock and devastation - with Stage C advanced bowel cancer.
When I read that my chances of survival at that time, on paper, were just 34 per cent, the hairs on the back of my head stood up in fear and I faced years of worrying whether I would live to see my son grow up.
Today I’m cured - but that’s down to luck rather than good judgment.
Looking back, it was the dark ages for this common cancer. Most sufferers died, and Britain’s survival rates were among the worst in Europe.
Now we have gone from zero to hero - and all credit to the Government for announcing a new world-beating screening programme for bowel cancer, which starts rolling out across England from next year.
‘Totally elated’ and ‘fantastic’ are not the sort of words normally uttered by the top medical specialists and scientists in our country, but that’s the welcome the new screening programme has received.
‘It’s remarkable how quickly the Government has acted,’ says John O’Donohue, medical lead for London’s bowel cancer-screening programme.
‘It is rare to see such a genuine breakthrough as this test - and fantastic to see it being introduced so quickly.’
The Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, says the Government acted quickly after being convinced by research into bowel cancer screening.
‘This research was very persuasive,’ he tells The Mail on Sunday. ‘It could save 3,000 lives a year.’
But if you are thinking bowel cancer-screening already exists, you’re right. A free screening programme started in England and Scotland in 2006. The existing programme is based on home-testing kits looking for traces of hidden blood in our stools, with follow-up colonoscopy if the kits show a problem.
Mr Lansley acknowledges that screening programmes ‘suffer from people who don’t respond’. He says: ‘Men are a problem. One of the benefits of this programme is that it’s curative as well as investigative.’ But Lansley believes that ‘people will be more willing to respond than to the present programme’.
The Health Secretary also wants to tackle what we eat, believing the country’s changing diet over the years is worrying - ‘with consequently rising rates of bowel cancer’.
In the English screening programme, more than 7,000 cases of cancer have already been found at a much earlier, curable stage - doubling the rate of early detection.
These kits have already been sent to most of the homes of those aged 50 or over in Scotland (ahead because almost half of Scotland was an original pilot site), and those aged 60 or above in England, with Wales and Ireland now joining in.
What the Government announced towards the end of last year was
Tags: health secretary, screening initiative, gp surgery, primetime, survival rates
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