1 INTRODUCTION

The most frightening thing that can be imagined by the majority of people is to be told that they have cancer. We drift through life reading articles about cancer, we may know someone who has had cancer or watch programmes on television about cancer. In recent years we have been told by the food police what we should eat to avoid cancer and yet we all continue to live out our lives truly believing that 'it can't happen to me.' This is an understandable form of self-delusion, necessary to enable us to carry on with life without torment.

When it does happen, and, for almost one in three of the total population, it will at some time, the news can be viewed almost as a death sentence.

The publicity about cancer, its treatment, early detection and the huge research budget world-wide, together with its sheer prevalence in the general population, means that almost all of us feel that we know something about the disease, know someone who has had it or have had some other contact with it.

The level of incidence in the population would qualify the description as epidemic in any other circumstance, but there is great determination by the medical profession and the authorities not to refer to the disease by such a term. They refer to all the specific cancer diseases as separate and different, collating statistics for each of the separate incidences. This would seem to neglect the fact that overall, the total number of people suffering from cancer related illness is staggering and that the underlying causes are likely to be the same or at least similar.

The incidence of cancer in women has, quite rightly, been the subject of intense publicity over the last decade and the treatment and screening programmes for breast and cervical cancer have had huge resources allocated to them. Some of the professionals involved in these programmes, including Government officers, have made significant claims about their success. Despite all this, the number of women being diagnosed increases year by year with doubts being expressed about the efficacy of many of these programmes by other professionals.

For men, the situation is very different. The second most common form of cancer in men is now that occurring in the prostate, accounting for over a quarter of all the incidences of the disease in men. Worldwide, nearly half-a-million men are diagnosed with prostate tumours each year and some forecasts suggest that over the next twenty years the number will triple.

And yet a small fraction of the resources and publicity provided for women's cancers have been made available for men despite this huge incidence. Men must become much more vocal in expressing their dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. It is important that we raise awareness of prostate cancer to combat the ignorance and stigma that surrounds the disease. A recent newspaper survey revealed just how ignorant men are about the condition. Almost a third of men interviewed in the survey did not know that the prostate gland is found only in males and 10 per cent have no idea where it is. The inevitable result of this level of ignorance and complacency is that we men will keep on dying quietly in ever increasing numbers. In the US alone, the disease kills nearly 30,000 men each year. For each of those that have family, friends, loved ones, then the number of people who will be affected by the disease is huge.

I believe the whole question of research needs to be examined by some independent and objective organisation. For the money that has been poured into cancer research since the Second World War, we could have not only put men on the moon we could also have put them on most other planets. And yet, the scientists tell us that, despite all this, they still do not fully understand the fundamental cause of the disease. Well I have some suggestions for them, see my chapter on Body Burden.

Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that pharmaceutical companies, intent on finding treatments for the disease, provide much of the funding for research worldwide. It is necessary to recognise that what they are looking for are treatments and not cures; treatments that they hope will be dispensed for weeks, months and years. I am sorry to say that viewed objectively, no matter how positive one's view of commercial enterprise, one has to assume that these companies have no commercial interest in cures, less still in finding a preventative mechanism with the potential to eliminate the disease. So we continually read in the papers about some new wonder drug that offers fresh hope in the fight against cancer, but see no real improvement in the elimination of the disease and poor improvements in survival rates of those suffering from cancer.

What then of all the charitable money raised through collections and donations to the numerous charities associated with cancer. What is happening to that? What progress is being made if any, and how do we find out about it? The answer is, with great difficulty. So many of these charities exist, some principally to provide care and support to patients, others to provide specialised equipment or information and advice about treatment and lifestyles, as well as those who are investing in the research field it. It is therefore, extremely difficult to extrapolate results in any meaningful way. This is why some independent monitoring of the situation is desperately needed. How do we know what sort of value for money we are getting for our investment in taxes and in voluntary donations? How do we tell what direction the research is taking and whether it is ever likely to yield any sort of result? I know from personal experience that for many scientists, the mere fact of doing research is the motivation, and I wonder just how much of the research is profiting individual careers and reputations. How do we know? The answer is we don't. This is not to deny the integrity of the bulk of the good people working in all those laboratories up and down the country, but at the end of the day, how do we know what our money is being spent on. We need some totally independent assessment of all the research programmes, their effectiveness and value.

If you consider that the research budget of just the U.S. is huge, the world-wide spend is absolutely astronomic. What we are looking at is a cancer industry with the patient as the customer and no guarantee that the customer is getting the best deal.

I believe that it is likely that the eventual solution to the cancer problem lies in our environment, in our lifestyle and in our food, for these are surely the factors which have changed most during the remorseless rise in the incidence of cancers. Where is the research into the lifestyle factors that could provide the long-term answer to this epidemic of misery?