UK among Europe’s worst for cancer funding

The United Kingdom lags behind nearly every other European country when it comes to investment in cancer services and has some of the poorest survival rates for the disease, says the London Daily Telegraph.

Consider:
 

• Just £80 (about R1,100) per head of population is spent on cancer in England, compared to £121 (about R1,670) per head in France and £143 (about R1,970) per head in Germany.
   
• Just 5.6 per cent of the total health budget is spent on cancer compared to 7.7 percent in France, 9.2 percent in the United States and 9.6 percent in Germany.
  
  Further:
   
• The United Kingdom ranks 22nd out of 28 European countries for mortality rates among women with cancer, and is ninth for mortality among men.
   
• The figures from 2006 show women in Estonia, Slovakia, Lithuania and Slovenia are all more likely to survive cancer than women in the United Kingdom.
   
• For men in the United Kingdom, mortality rates are better than in Eastern Europe but still lag behind Iceland, Sweden, Malta, Finland, Cyprus, Switzerland, Norway and Germany.
  
  Spending on cancer has increased by 27 per cent over the last three years in the United Kingdom, making it the third-highest funded disease behind mental health and circulatory disease – despite being the biggest killer.
  
  Source: Rebecca Smith, UK 'among Europe's worst' for cancer funding, Daily Telegraph, December 4, 2007.
  
  For text: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/12/04/ncancer204.xml
  
  For more on International Issues: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_Category=26
  
  FMF Policy Bulletin/ 11 December 2007