Tessa Jowell is right about cancer treatment: Britain must do better | Christina Patterson

Her fearless speech was also a reasonable demand for more shared knowledge, faster diagnosis and wider access to experimental treatments

On 24 May last year, Tessa Jowell found she could not speak. Two days later, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Two weeks after that, the tumour was cut out. Six months on, she can’t say she was cured, but she sure as hell could speak this week.

“I don’t think I immediately leapt to the inevitability of cancer,” she told Nick Robinson on the Today programme on Wednesday. “To begin with, I thought I would have this tumour, that it would be operated on and that would be it.” That, it turned out, was not it. Now her life, she said, was “affected” by her tumour. “How do I know,” she asked, “how long it’s going to last.”

Public money has to be geared towards what has been tested to save us from snake oil and expensive false hope

Related: Tessa Jowell calls for global cooperation to help cancer patients

Continue reading... January 26, 2018 at 10:48PM