Comment: Large blood cancer survival differences throughout Europe

Prof Martine Piccart - Jules Bordet Institute, Brussels, Belgium

We saw a presentation regarding disparities across Europe. What can we do about this?

I am personally very distressed by this data that there are so big differences in five year outcomes for different cancers across Europe, in the European Union, in 2015. Now the data were for the period up to 2007, I think, but they are worrisome and what disturbs me is that it is critically important that we give enough funding to cancer registries because that’s the only way we can monitor what’s going on in Europe and the cancer registries are not consistent from one country to the other. Some are collecting very few data and that means that when you find out that there are these differences and then you want to understand why, you need to be able to go back and look in detail at patient characteristics, tumour characteristics, what was the treatment given and that means that you need a lot of data, accurate data, and that is costly. But that is critically important and that should be a priority of governments to make sure that this is working well and, if possible, that all over Europe we can agree on a common way to capture these data.