Cancer Research UK did this amazing piece of research, and they discovered that one in four people think that cancer has nothing to do with risk factors and is only down to fate.
It is amazing, after half a century of campaigning about smoking, and twenty five years about the sun, and a least a few decades about five fruit and veg a dag, how little the message gets through. In poorer areas, that number reaches almost half of the population believes its fate.
I think one of the reasons is the complete mumbo jumbo that is so often spoken about the disease. Yesterday a faith healer (admittedly quite a comic one) was on BBC2 explaining that cancer is all about emotions, and Sense About Science recently wrote about the rubbish that celebrities speak about science.
And this really affects people's lives.
It really is time to change how we think about cancer.
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