A review of 69 studies from across the world has found that there was “a consistent global drop in access to cancer care” – both for adults and for children – during the first wave of Covid due to the restrictive measures introduced by governments. The review, led by Carl Heneghan, Jon Brassey, and Tom Jefferson for Collateral Global, highlights that late-stage cancer presentations (which are linked to decreased survival rates for certain cancers) increased because of delays to screenings, diagnoses, waiting lists and treatments during lockdowns, as well as after restrictions were lifted.
In an editorial based on their review, Carl Heneghan (Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford) and Tom Jefferson (an epidemiologist and expert on respiratory diseases) present the findings from various studies on changes to cancer services due to government-imposed restrictions.
From mid-March until the end of April 2020, a cervical cancer screening unit in Cameroon saw screening numbers drop by nearly 80%. This is troubling because late-stage presentations are linked to decreased cervical cancer survival. The five-year survival rate for U.S. women diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer is 15% compared with 93% for those presenting much earlier with localised disease. A similar outcome is seen in low-income countries. In India, for example, the five-year survival is 9% for advanced disease compared with 78% when the cancer is diagnosed at stage one when it is localised to the cervix.
Several studies in our review reported that when routine services resumed after restrictions were lifted, there was still a shift to later-stage disease presentations, even in countries that were relatively unaffected by the pandemic.
In a Japanese regional treatment centre, no significant changes were seen in the number of patients undergoing surgery. However, the number of patients undergoing surgery with advanced disease increased compared with before the emergency. In three university-affiliated hospitals in Korea, the number of cancers diagnosed remained the same; however, the proportion of patients with stage three-four non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) increased to 75% compared to an average of 63% in the three previous years.
Not all cancers have the same prognosis but presenting late with lung cancer is bad news. In those with early disease, more than 55 out of 100 people will survive for five years or more after diagnosis. But in later stage four disease – which has spread beyond the lungs – only five out of 100 survive for five years or more.
In low resource settings, delays had lethal effects. Among Indian patients presenting to a tertiary care hospital with oral cancers, 39% were deemed inoperable in the early three months of the Covid pandemic – double the number compared with the pre-Covid era.
These delays in care were not restricted to adults as children were affected in a variety of countries. In Turkey, a major Paediatric Oncology Department reported reductions in children undergoing chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, and imaging studies during the Covid period. In Italy, presentations to the National Pediatric Oncology Unit in Milan during the lockdown phase were half of what would normally be expected. And in a U.S. tertiary referral centre, 75% of new leukaemia/lymphoma diagnoses required intensive care in April 2020 compared with a monthly average of 12% in 2018–2019.
Patients with cancer often delay seeking medical advice. The early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic substantially exacerbated these delays. The true extent of the impact of these delays may never be known. However, a substantial body of evidence reports that delays lead to later-stage cancer, which translates into more severe disease and subsequently reduces life expectancy. Low and middle-income countries are disproportionately affected by cancer, where more than two-thirds of all global deaths occur.
Worth reading in full.
The full review can be found here.
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This is an absolute disgrace, a serious charge which requires an explanation to Parliament.
But it is pretty clear what so many democratic socialist governments across the world have been up to.
‘…..using psychological remoulding as a tactic for political hegemony’
After all, it is not as though this kind of power grab hasn’t happened before:
‘……revolutionary ideals had to be protected from weeds of doubt by vigorous assertion and mass coercion…….people were attached to the new order primarily through terror or emotional appeal’
https://jsis.washington.edu/ellisoncenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2016/05/dome_REECASNW.pdf
The title of this referenced article?
‘A Timid Flock: Investigating Propaganda Under Stalin’
Plus ca change……..
The title of another article :
“Investigating the right-wing free market theology’s tendency to fascism”
Fascism is inherently MARXIST.
That fascism is right wing is the biggest lie the left ever told, and they’ve told some whopping lies.
“Fascism is inherently MARXIST.”
I know people can’t necessarily being incredibly thick and deluded.
But it does seem odd to want to advertise the fact
Do try to find out what terms vaguely mean.
100% correct. The word ‘fascism’ derives from ‘fasces’, latin for bundle, so collectivism.
Oh!!! The brightness of political and linguistic insight shines from the goldfish bowl!
Just go and preach your irrelevant and nonsensical obsessions elsewhere, and leave this site for intelligent discussion and information.
‘…leave this site for intelligent discussion and information’
But not from you, as usual. How very Cummings/Johnsonian……
You should be in the cabinet…
Far better to stay there out of the sun unless you have any useful contribution to make.
Silly vapours do you no credit.
Fascism
“Everything inside the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.”
Mussolini.
Sounds a tad hostile to free exchange, markets, private treatment in fact everything that creates wealth.
Well – that’s an exercise of a small brain, using ‘Mussolini’ and ‘state’ as cues to defy logic.
In actuality, (and factually) the platform for this outbreak of totalitarianism has more to do with Hayek’s with Marx. It’s a creature of unregulated neoliberal global capitalism, not some vague ‘socialist’ conspiracy – i.e an infection from the bug-eyed right rather than the cross-eyed left.
‘…..unregulated neoliberal global capitalism’
Loving the humour.
Here’s some bedtime reading:
‘In the preface to The Limits of the Market, Paul De Grauwe, an economics professor at the London School of Economics, begins with two basic premises: first, that a centrally planned economy does not work; second, that pure market systems do not exist anywhere.’
https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/winter-2018/limits-market-pendulum-between-government-market-paul-de-grauwe
‘Rather than augmenting private governance, government is often the primary obstacle. Government often crowds out, restricts, or co-opts providers of private governance and forces them to pursue government’s objectives. In some markets the government imposes rules and regulations that providers of private governance would have adopted on their own. Commonly, however, government imposes rules and regulations with little regard for whether they actually benefit market participants. Like price controls that interfere with supply and demand equilibration, government rules and regulations interfere with the searches for beneficial rules and regulations by providers of private governance.’
‘Private Governance: Creating Order in Economic and Social Life’
Edward Peter Stringham
Thought that might get the odd goldfish with little brain but big mouth to bite
It was never the government’s intention to save people from dying.
A cynical person might wonder if the old and infirm were intentionally targeted to ease the burden on the pension and social security systems.
Hmm, I’m dubious about that – consider the cost of £400 billion and counting! The old and infirm are just a small collateral ‘benefit’, CONTROL is the real target.
Everyome who dies of cancer DIDN’T die of covid. Which is good.
Oh well, if it was only cancer they were threatened with.
Only a slow, agonising death from a disease that can strike at any age.
Not as if it was something serious, like the covvisniffle.
I wonder just how many were killed by the systemic failure of N”H”S?
The worst thing was so many could not even get better by going private as the bureaucrats had co-opted private hospitals and done nowt with them.
“the systemic failure of N”H”S”
No. It’s the systemic failure of the Tory Party in government, not the NHS.
… and the idea that private provision is somehow naturally better is ludicrous to anyone who’s seen both in action. Pure delusion.
I’ve endured both the extortion-funded ration of treatment and the exceptional service, care and attention I’ve had when I paid.
You are frankly barking if you think the NHS is good for anything except lying about how many people its managed to put 6 feet under.
You are talking absolute crap.
I’ve had a massive amount of NHS treatment in the last decade. Not uniformly perfect – but exceptionally good in the main. A far better sample than your doctrinal pronouncements.
Neighbour : two private assaults on spinal injury from the private sector before the NHS put it right.
The latter not a good random sample – but certainly enough to put to bed any simplistic notions about the natural superiority of private provision.
Sorry – Covmaniacs/’Free’ market shut-eyed obsessives/Tooting Trots and SWP etc. : they’re all bug-eyed nonsense gabblers with more in common with each other than rational thinkers.
Perhaps the answer is for obsessives here to get together with their soul-mates on Skwawkbox and just waste their mutual time on shouting bug-eyed nonsense at each other.
Aha you must’ve got some healthy person to parasite upon.
After all those who look after their health pay more than twice for their inadequate ration of treatment. First for their own, then for the malingerer, then because the NHS subsidises and thus encourages health failure the restrictions on choice because the feckless externalise their poor choices on the healthy.
The duggies still snapping in fury at reality.
Hey up! The duggies without brain getting excited again!
… and again.
The goldfish mouths still opening and closing to order as they defend the coup by Johnson and his right-wing mates
Go see a doctor about your spluttering over the keyboard when you are allowed to by the health bureaucracy.
I think you’ve now proved my point sufficiently re. unintelligent beating of the battered drums of non-think.
BTW – Being a performing twat is not really a good look for responding convincingly to evidence that doesn’t suit your limited preconceptions.
Hi, Rick. Please give it a rest.
If someone is holding a gun to my head while stealing my wallet, my feelings towards him are unlikely to be influenced by his voting intentions.
I suggest we postpone discussions about the political genesis of the covid fraud while we work on recovering our freedom.
The dictatorships propaganda unit is saying a winter respiratory illness will be rampant on mid summers day
Of course it will
oh but wait two weeks!!!
I find it incredible that no one in this government could have foreseen the impact that enforcing a national lockdown along with a campaign of endless psychological fear-driven propaganda would have on public behaviour whereby those with other serious medical symtoms requiring early treatments for diseases that are far more fatal than covid19 were either too scared to leave their homes, to afraid to go to hospital or even unable get a doctors appointment because of the covid paranoia that was deliberately whipped-up by this government to ensure public compliance.
This was criminal negligence on a massive scale.
Heads must roll for this – prosecutions and jail sentences..
How people can be so dumb to think that you can concentrate all of your resources into one fairly insignificant illness, then claim that you’ve “saved” lives baffles me.
British Citizen Entrance Exam 2021
Question One
If the British were robbed of their liberty would they
a Buy a dog
b Buy a Volkswagen camper van
c Vote for their tormentors
d All of the above
e Blame a left wing conspiracy for the actions of a government of the right.
The Conservatives aren’t in power in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, are they?
And the idea that this government is “of the right” is just ludicrous: they have no policies or principles that I can support, which is why for the first time ever in a GE I didn’t vote for them at the last one.
“And the idea that this government is “of the right” is just ludicrous: they have no policies that I can support,”
That only proves how weird and solipsistic some of the right has become in their fantasy land of loony political definition. Totally detached from reality.
I have been – I confess – taking the piss out of this sort of loopy detachment from reality and cult of denial (not difficult).
But there is a point behind it which isn’t funny. The association of lockdown scepticism with the shit-for-brains loony right simply opens the door to satire and dismissal. It simply does the job of 77th Brigade without them doing anything, as ludicrous notions are used to nullify opposition.
Meanwhile, the real political aims of the establishment – embracing both Tories and the captured non-opposition walk away scot-free with their fabrication and the imposition of a police state.
It is continually manufacturing grist for the Covid mill – not opposition, and making it harder for the rational case to get through when such utter bollocks is easily cited by the Covid zealots, and used to deter potential allies.
Playground stuff – not great intelligence!
Why do people need studies to make them believe what they can see for themselves is true?