Lung Cancer - Invisible Syndrome

SEVEN out of ten people in Britain believe that smokers who develop lung cancer have brought the disease on themselves, according to a MORI poll for The Cancer Research Campaign.

SEVEN out of ten people in Britain believe that smokers who develop lung cancer have brought the disease on themselves, according to a MORI poll for The Cancer Research Campaign.

The charity, which has dubbed it 'the invisible cancer', believes this could help explain why the disease has such a low public profile, even though it claims the lives of around 33,400 Britons each year. And it has named January Lung Cancer Awareness Month in a bid to put the issue on the national agenda.

The Campaign's Head of Clinical Programmes Dr Richard Sullivan says: "It may as well be invisible for all the public attention it gets. This poll shows most people feel that, for smokers, it's a self-inflicted disease which, we believe, helps explain its lack of profile."

The charity's Director General Prof Gordon McVie says: "If you think it's your own fault that you have got lung cancer, you're more likely to 'put up and shut up' and that's exactly the attitude we need to change."

"We want people to start demanding better treatment and better resources for the disease - particularly as the overwhelming majority of people do not want lung cancer patients to be discriminated against," adds Dr Sullivan.

According to the poll, which questioned over 2,000 people across Britain, eighty-four per cent of people felt that lung cancer sufferers were as deserving of NHS treatment as other cancer patients.

While three quarters of respondents felt that smokers who developed lung cancer had as much right to a hospital bed as those who develop other forms of cancer.

Yet in England and Wales today survival rates for all the most common cancers (breast, prostate and bowel) have gone up for people diagnosed between the late 80s and early 90s - except for lung cancer.

Prof Gordon McVie adds: "There has been a wall of silence surrounding lung cancer for far too long. We need to break this down and show that we do care for patients with the disease - regardless of whether or not they developed it because of smoking."

Around 38,000 people in Great Britain develop lung cancer every year and around 33,400 die of it annually. More than 90 per cent of lung cancers are caused by smoking.

Readers who want to support the charity's campaign are asked to write with their views, address and other contact details to Lung Cancer Awareness Month, The Cancer Research Campaign, 10 Cambridge Terrace, London, NW1 4JL. Where appropriate, letters will be passed on to people's local MPs to highlight the issue to Government.

Technical details

  • Latest figures show that lung cancer kills 33,370 people every year in Great Britain, compared to large bowel cancer which kills 16,260, breast cancer which kills 12,680 and prostate cancer which kills 9,270.
  • Lung cancer recently overtook breast cancer as the single biggest cause of death from cancer in women in Great Britain.
  • MORI interviewed a representative quota sample of 2,024 adults aged 16+ throughout Great Britain. All interviews were conducted face-to-face and in-home between 23-28 November 2000 using 195 sampling points. All data are weighted to the national population profile.
  • Data sources:
    • Figures for England and Wales:
    • Incidence and Survival: National Cancer Intelligence Centre, The Office for National Statistics.
    • Mortality: The Office for National Statistics www.statistics.gov.uk

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