WE all know that cancer can strike anyone of any age and is no respecter of wealth, fame or even of you being a nice person who doesn’t deserve it.
Once, if someone was diagnosed with cancer it felt like a death sentence. Now, this has changed dramatically and new figures show that half of all people diagnosed with the disease will survive at least a decade. This is double the rate in the early 1970s and very welcome news indeed.
However, as Su Long, chief officer of the NHS Bolton Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) states, we still need to be vigilant about the signs of cancer and seek early help.
She explained that there had been “a real focus in recent years on allowing people to access life-saving cancer treatment more quickly, through rapid referral in our GP practices ad timely treatment in our hospitals.”
Although, sadly, many people do still die of the disease – around a quarter of all deaths in Bolton are due to cancer – checking ourselves regularly for early signs and going to our GP gives everyone a better chance of survival.
The latest figures from Cancer Research UK also provide a “tipping point” in the way we should be thinking about cancer, according to that  organisation’s chief executive, Dr Harpal Kumar.
All of this is very heartenng – although tempered by figures that reveal that certain cancers like pancreatic cancer and lung cancer have lower survival rates.
Bolton is very lucky, both in its local facilities and in its nearness to the world-famous Christie hospital in Manchester. The town has its own excellent treatment unit at the Royal Bolton Hospital and a pool of expertise available to help with both early diagnosis and successful treatment.
The real key to fighting cancer, though, is about how we live and how much responsibility we take for our lifestyle. There is no doubting the fact that if we smoke, drink too much alcohol, are overweight and don’t get much exercise we are putting ourselves in the cancer firing line.
Cancer in all its forms loves unhealthy lifestyles. Even though it still strikes those with extremely healthy lives, it is up to each one of us to assess the way we live and try to improve it if we are to give ourselves a fighting chance of not ending up as simply a sad statistic.