Cancer risk is higher in Britain

THE RISK of dying from lung cancer caused by smoking is up to five times higher for British women than it is for females in the rest of Europe, a leading charity said yesterday.

The Cancer Research Campaign claimed UK women had five times the lung cancer death risk of women in Spain, and they were four times more likely to die from the disease than women in Portugal and France. And their risk of dying from the smoking-related cancer is more than twice that of women in Austria, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Italy, Germany and Sweden.

The only country with a higher lung cancer death rate among women was Denmark. Professor Gordon McVie, director general of the Cancer Research Campaign, said: "The epidemic of lung cancer deaths has already hit the UK but I fear that the number of women dying elsewhere in Europe has yet to peak." In the UK between 1988 and 1992, 21.1 women per 100,000 died from lung cancer.