Breast cancer charities defend NHS screening

Cancer charities insisted women should continue going for breast screening yesterday despite suggestions from one of the pioneers of the NHS programme that it should be scrapped.

Professor Michael Baum, who established one of the first breast screening centres in the UK 15 years ago, warned that testing led to hundreds of healthy women having unnecessary and often mutilating treatment every year.

Professor Baum, a long-standing critic of the breast-screening programme, which costs £50m a year, said in a newspaper interview: "Women are being coerced into screening but are not being told the full facts about the risks. The agents of the state say I am a maverick but I am at the sharp end and I see the casualties of screening."

Professor Baum has suggested the money saved from scrapping the programme should instead be spent on developing new drugs and reducing waiting times.

"Life is of infinite value and you cannot put a price on that, but the problem is what happens to the thousands of other women who go through false alarms and overtreatment," said Professor Baum, who was addressing the Royal Society of Medicine in London yesterday.

He said the programme had to screen 1,000 women over 50 for 10 years to save a single life.

But Professor Stephen Duffy, professor of cancer screening for the charity Cancer Research UK, said women should not be frightened away. About 1.5 million women are screened in Britain every year.

"Research both by Cancer Research UK and by the World Health Organisation indicates that screening reduces premature deaths from breast cancer by about a third and cuts the number of women needing mastectomies by 40 per cent. Most breast cancer patients have excellent survival prospects thanks to screening and recent improvements in treatment," he said.

Delyth Morgan, chief executive of the charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said more than 7,000 British cases of the disease were found by the screening programme every year. She warned that Professor Baum's remarks could lead to a lack of confidence in the UK's screening programme. "Breakthrough is worried that women invited to screening may now be put off taking up their appointments – with tragic consequences," she said. "Early detection and diagnosis is vital to improve women's survival chances."

Nearly 40,000 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year in the UK and 13,000 die from the disease.