This week (23rd-29th June 2025) is Cancer Prevention Action Week (CPAW). The focus for this year’s CPAW is that tricky subject – the link between alcohol and cancer. But what’s the purpose of CPAW and why this particular focus?
Thinking about and campaigning on cancer prevention is at the heart of what CancerWatch does as a charity and we do this all year round. But for most people, including health professionals and policy makers, that almost certainly isn’t the case.
Most of us think about cancer most intensely when it affects us directly through its impact on us, our friends and family. When this happens, we think about diagnosis, treatment, survival, recovery, fear of mortality, loss, and the preciousness of time. Generally speaking, this is what health professionals and policymakers tend to focus on as well.
For understandable reasons, policymakers are typically focused on how to improve all of these things – how to diagnose earlier, treat sooner and more effectively, so as to maximise people’s chance of survival and minimise deaths. And as for the approximately 60% of cancer cases that are not preventable – cases that as far as we are aware nothing could have prevented – those things are all we can focus on.
But around 40% of cancer cases are preventable. These are cancers caused by factors in our wider social and economic environment, cancers that, if those factors had not been present, would not have happened.
That 40% figure represents an awful lot of pain, fear, loss, and lengthy difficult treatments, all of which could potentially have been avoided. Therefore, it is absolutely right that we should take time to step back and focus on what our response to this should be.
And Cancer Prevention Action Week provides an opportunity to do precisely that – to focus a bit more attention on the 40% of cancer cases that are preventable, what we can do to reduce them, and what a serious strategy to reduce preventable cancers across the board might look like.
This will require us to look again at some of the key causal factors in preventable cancers, not just tobacco and smoking, but the role of diet and obesity, the links between alcohol and cancer, and exposure to UV rays in skin cancer.
CancerWatch exists because we believe this conversation should have much greater prominence, and it’s a conversation we pursue all year round.
We believe it’s time for policymakers to do the same. And there are some good signs here, with the “move from sickness to prevention” being identified in the consultations for both the National Cancer Plan and the 10 Year NHS Health Plan.
But what we need is an approach to cancer prevention that truly lives up to this rhetoric. And now is the time to start.
The CancerWatch Team – June 2025