More than 100 MPs, including Rishi Sunak, have called Wes Streeting introduce prostate cancer screening.
The UK National Select Committee, a government agency that advises ministers and National Health Service about all aspects of screening, will recommend whether screening should be offered to men at higher risk of disease. He is due to write to the health minister later this week, the Telegraph reports.
Sunak, who leads a cross-party alliance of 125 MPs, met Streeting on Monday evening to deliver an open letter calling on the government to introduce tests so men are most at risk. including black menmen with a family history of prostate, breast or ovarian cancer, and those who carry the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, are “no longer left behind.”
The letter states: “Our current opportunistic PSA [prostate-specific antigen] testing system unstructured, inefficient and unfair: it is a postcode lottery in which some men succeed because they know to ask or can pay privately, while others are turned away despite repeated requests.
“However, the data hides something that cannot be modeled: eroded trust among communities that feel abandoned. already in a high-risk groupoften feel that the system is failing them. Families bear the devastating emotional and financial burden of advanced disease—costs that are absent from formal modeling but are among the most compelling reasons to act.
“We now have the tools to conduct screening safely and effectively, but the system is stuck waiting for the next generation of test data.
“Waiting will reinforce inequality and prevent deaths. The evidence is compelling enough to act now. Perfection should not be the enemy of progress.”
The push comes every other day David Cameron has revealed that he was being treated for prostate cancer. He called for a targeted screening program.
Cameron, 59, told the Times: “You always hope for the best. You have a high PSA – that's probably nothing.”
“You have an MRI scan with several black marks. You think: “Oh, this is probably normal.” But when the biopsy comes back and it says you have prostate cancer.
“You're always afraid to hear those words. And then literally when they come out of the doctor's mouth, you think, 'Oh, no, he's going to say that.' He will say it. Oh God, he said it.”
Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men in the UK, with around 55,000 new cases diagnosed each year.
There is no screening program for the form of the disease in the UK due to concerns about the accuracy of PSA tests.
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine last month proposed Prostate cancer screening can reduce mortality by 13%.
The researchers found that one prostate cancer death was averted for every 456 men invited to screening, and that one prostate cancer death was averted for every 12 men diagnosed with prostate cancer.
