Britain has achieved a transformation in breast cancer care of young women in the last 25 years, a conference will hear today.
In contrast France is struggling to deliver improvements in survival while Britain’s one-time position as the worst place to get the cancer has been taken by Romania.
The European Breast Cancer Conference will hear that in 1987 England and Wales had Europe’s highest breast cancer death rates – with the disease killed nearly 42 women out of every 100,000 annually.
At the time Romania reported the lowest death rates, half the English total, although at the time the country was ruled by an idiosyncratic communist dictatorship.
In England women faced waiting lists of weeks or months to get suspicious lumps tested.
Professor Philippe Autier, from the International Prevention Research Institute, Lyon, France, said the death rate in England and Wales had fallen by 40% but increased by 11% in Romania – which still has a slightly lower death rate than England.
Professor Autier said the lowest reduction in death rates of women under the age of 50 was in France.
He told the conference in Glasgow, Scotland: "Given that France devotes substantial resources to cancer care and that Frenchwomen have access to the best treatment, there is something going on here that we don’t understand and that needs urgent investigation."
He said the reductions in death rates were "largely" due to improved treatment, arguing that screening programmes struggled to identify the most life-threatening forms of the disease at an early sage.
Professor Autier said France and Sweden were two countries where screening programmes had proved disappointing in cutting death rates.
But other countries had enjoyed big cuts in death rates after introducing screening after 2000. These included Norway, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria.
Conference organising committee chair Dr Hilary Dobson, of the West of Scotland Breast Screening Service, said: "These findings are an important contribution to the ongoing challenge of understanding which strategies should be implemented to improve survival from breast cancer.
"Comparison among countries reveals a picture of variation and real complexity when considering factors such as population screening or access to cancer drugs."
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