In a recent television programme on ITV, Exposure: too late to save your life, Prof Gordon Mcvie says the UK has not been putting the resources into early detection and screening that it should have for the last 20 years.

NHS programmes that regularly screen women for breast and cervical cancer are proving effective, but three other cancers – bowel, prostate and lung cancer – kill almost 60,000 people in Britain every year.

This amounts to almost 40 per cent of all cancer deaths in the UK - the equivalent of one every nine minutes.

Prof McVie has called for the UK to introduce a prostate screening programme in the UK:

“I think we need a screening programme. Because that does bring men into the system and it gives them contact with the issues around prostate cancer, and there are lots of issues for men to grasp around the area of prostate cancer. Most men do not know where their prostate is.”

Prof McVie was also featured in The Times recently, criticising a magazine sold in supermarkets in the UK that suggests that vitamin C and homeopathy can cure cancer.

“We have big enough problems in the UK with people’s misconceptions about cancer without having quackery in the aisles.”