But the cost of ensuring that cancer is no longer a death sentence could not be funded under the current National Health Service, they will argue.

Nick Bosanquet, professor of health policy, and Karol Sikora, professor of cancer medicine, both at Imperial College, London, state in The Economics of Cancer Care that unless the way we fund healthcare is changed, some patients will not be able to buy themselves survival.

Last week Sikora prescribed the cancer drug Tarceva, which is not routinely available on the NHS, privately to a young patient suffering from pancreatic cancer.

The “wonder” drug costs £75 a day and Sikora says the NHS must admit that it cannot afford to buy such expensive medicines for everyone.

Sikora said: “You need to take this drug forever, once a day. Imagine if all cancer patients had that additional cost on top of routine care.”

The survival rate after five years for most cancers, if detected early, is about 90% in western Europe and the USA.

The authors argue that most cancers could be brought under control, if enough money were spent on prevention such as screening programmes to catch the disease at an early stage, followed by swift prescription of the best drugs.

The book states: “We will convert cancer into a chronic, controllable illness similar to diabetes today.”

It adds: “Likely technological advances will bring greater treatment success but in many cases at a price beyond that affordable by state-driven medical services.”

At the moment, access to wonder drugs such as Herceptin and Tarceva is posing financial dilemmas and the government is considering scrapping the national bowel cancer screening programme, which was to be launched this year, because of a cash crisis in the NHS.

The authors say the funding shortfall will intensify: the number of cancer patients in Britain is set to increase by 2.5% every year as more people live with the disease. In the USA, the number of cancer survivors has risen from 3m in 1970 to 10m in 2000.

The cost of looking after these patients has also rocketed. This is not just because more patients are being treated but also because the cost of cancer medicines has increased more than treatments for other illnesses. The cost of cancer drugs in the USA has risen tenfold since 1991 while the cost of drugs for other diseases has risen only threefold.

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