The Rights Of Man

PROSATE CANCER CONFERENCE TOMORROW

Tomorrow sees the Medicine and Me Prostate Cancer Conference in London

Monday, 16th July 2007
Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London, W1G 0AE

The Prostate Cancer Charity is partnering with the Royal Society of Medicine and the Prostate Cancer Charter for Action in delivering two half day conferences on 16th July 2007 focused on prostate cancer research. For more details see here (link).

Prostate Cancer Conference - 16th July

PROSTATE CANCER CONFERENCE

Monday, 16th July 2007
Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London, W1G 0AE

More details here (link).

CHARITY NEEDS HELP AFTER SHOCKING MALE SUICIDE FIGURES REVEALED

The charity Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) revealed this week that 1,000 years of life are lost each year as a result of British men killing themselves. Of those 4,343 people who committed suicide in England and Wales in 2005, three quarters were men (3,228) and the highest rate has been among 15 to 44 year old men.

The Campaign Against Living Miserably is targeted at young men aged between 15-35. The campaign was launched as a pilot by the Dept of Health in Manchester on in 1997, and finally became a charity in 2006.

Working with people from the music, sport and club scenes CALM encourages young men to 'open up' and sort out their problems.

They have launched a campaign to persuade 500 firms to give £100 each towards a new, anonymous and confidential helpline and on-line web chat service. If any readers can spare the money, this is a worthwhile cause.

The charity's helpline has been suspended due to the usual crass decision-making by the Lottery Fund. If ever there was a case of an organisation in need of support this was one.

Their excellent web-site can be found here (link) and offers advice and links to other help groups.

NATIONAL MEN'S HEALTH WEEK 11th-17th JUNE

The Men's Health Forum are running National Men's Health Week from 11th to 17th June (Fathers Day).

Details can be found here (link).

Here are some grim statistics copied from their web-site:-

• The average life expectancy of a male born in the UK in 1997 is still less than 75 years.
• Men who are defined as partly skilled or unskilled have a life expectancy of less than 70 years.
• The average man can expect to be seriously or chronically ill for 15 years of his life.
• The majority of men are too heavy for their health: 45% are medically defined as overweight and an additional 17% as obese.
• 28% of men still smoke.
• 27% of men drink alcohol at a level that could be harmful to their health.
• 41% of all male deaths under the age of 75 (almost 60,000 a year in the UK) are caused by circulatory diseases, the largest single cause of death. Of these deaths, over two-thirds (some 41,000) are due to coronary heart disease. Each year, over 130,000 men of all ages die from circulatory diseases.
• 31% of all male deaths under the age of 75 (almost 48,000 a year in the UK) are caused by cancer, the second most common cause of death. Each year, over 124,000 men of all ages are newly diagnosed with cancer and over 80,000 die.
• Prostate cancer is the most common cancer affecting men alone. Nearly 22,000 men in the UK are newly diagnosed with prostate cancer each year and about 9,500 die. The number of new cases diagnosed is expected to treble over the next 20 years.
• The suicide rate among men is increasing. The rate has doubled among 15–24 year old men in the past 25 years.
• Many men are affected by sexual problems. Recent American research suggests that almost one-third of men of all ages say they climax too early and nearly one-fifth of men in their 50s experience problems achieving or maintaining an erection.

Scotland 10K for Men in Bellahouston Park

Please support and take part in the UK’s only 10k run specifically for men and raise much needed funds for The Prostate Cancer Charity.

Take part in the Men’s Health Forum Scotland 10K for Men in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow on Sunday 17th June 2007 – Father’s Day!

MORE DETAILS HERE - (LINK)

FAKE PROSTATE CANCER DRUGS ALERT

The Daily Telegraph on Saturday 2nd June 2007 had a story about the uncovering of a batch of fake prostate cancer drugs. The drugs are a counterfeit of Casodex. Read details here on the Telegraph (link), the Prostate Cancer Charity (link) and the Regulatory Agency (link).

MIXED-SEX WARDS : SCANDAL CONTINUES

Despite over 80 tax rises, an increase in NHS spending from £44 billion to £76 billion p.a. since 2000 and being promised that voting Labour would save the NHS, the key issue of ending the indignity of mixed-sex wards still continues.

The Guardian newspaper (link) summed it up on 10th May this week when a report conculded that 28 trusts still had not solved the problem:-

The health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, admitted yesterday that thousands of NHS patients were being caused "great distress" by the government's failure to honour its 1997 manifesto commitment to eliminate mixed-sex wards in England.

An investigation by the health service's chief nurse found more than 16% of NHS acute hospital trusts were still struggling to provide single-sex accommodation.

The finding - disclosed in a report yesterday from the Department of Health - appeared to contradict ministerial statements to parliament in January 2003 assuring MPs that 95% of trusts had met the target. Last year Ms Hewitt said 99% of trusts provided single-sex accommodation in general wards, including single-sex bathrooms and toilets. 28 trusts which are finding the target of eliminating mixed-sex accommodation "challenging".

Other coverage is here (link) and here (link).

This scandal affects both men and women equally and for this idignity to still be happening in the 21st century shows how awful the NHS management is. They treat people as numbers not as individuals.

REGIONAL VARIATION IN PROSTATE CANCER TREATMENT EXPOSED

The Daily Telegraph has recently run features in the week of 23rd April 2007 on the NHS (link).

One of the key parts of the campaign was to continue to highlight the NHS con trick where politicians state that the NHS is free for all and then deny people treatment simply because of where they live. This is made worse by the cuts many hospitals face in the infamous postcode lottery (link). It is one of the biggest con tricks perpetrated on the taxpayer and prostate cancer sufferers have been one of the worst groups affected as shown at (link) , (link) and (link).

The Telegraph highlighted the gap in treatment available in key areas and one of the areas they studied was on Prostate cancer. Their findings show that Cystoscopy (a test involving the use of a scope to examine the interior of a bladder), a crucial early warning system, is practically non-existent in Northern Ireland and also is lacking in areas such as the West and East Midlands.

Men and women should be able to get the same treatment wherever they live. Rightfully, there have been many campaigns for nationwide access for Herceptin, the breast cancer drug, and the same is needed for prostate cancer treatment especially as many men find they have a battle to get their hands on Taxotere, which costs less than half of Herceptin. This problems faced are clearly seen in the case of John Verrier Jones (link) (link), which highlighted the problems men face.

Prostate cancer sufferers are already seen as the forgotten cancer victims, this has to change and is why we need a Minister for Men (link) .

PROSTATE CANCER SCANDAL IN THE NHS

It was revealed by the BBC in April that because of the government's waiting list targets, men with low risk prostate cancer where not receiving the right treatment. Instead of receiving radiotherapy they were given hormone therapy instead.

Oncologist Chris Hamilton described the system as "crazy" where cancer specialists move prostate cancer sufferers down the waiting list by giving them hormone treatment to make way for others with urgent need for radiotherapy. He believes that this affects around 8% of prostate patients, some 2,500 men a year.

Links to this story are found in these places and if you scroll to the bottom of the first link (The Prostate Cancer Charity) you can here the BBC coverage (Link - The Prostate Cancer Charity),(Link- BBC), (Link- Daily Mail) (Link - Daily Mail). 

This issue compounds the continuing scandal on the battle that men face to get proper treatment for prostate cancer, despite, all those years of paying taxes. For example, 11 of 25 NHS Cancer Network Directors do not have specialist prostate cancer nurses (link).

The cancer kills 10,000 men per year, receives ten times less funding per year than breast cancer. and patients report a poorer experience of their care than other cancer patients according to the National Audit Office (link)

The UK's Orwellian health care system is getting worse and on this cancer issue, it is clear that men, as ever, are seen as a low priority by the bureaucrats, officials and politicians. The fact their arbitrary waiting times are forcing doctors to give treatment which is not appropriate shows how the NHS no longer works and is actually harming people rather than curing them.

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A DISCRIMINATED MAN (Evening) by JAMIE WATT

Third in a series of three describing the day in the life of a discriminated man (Morning posted 27th March, Evening 3rd April)

Part Three – Evening

On his way home from work, John hears a story about a woman having her handbag snatched from her in the High Street. Everyone is talking about it, and saying that the street is not a safe place for a woman. Yet again, statistics prove this to not be entirely true. Crime rates show that the victims of crimes of this nature are mostly young men. Despite this having been the case for the last few years, all of the campaign material about safer streets is aimed at women. This is also the case for domestic violence – all the helplines are for women, even though a survey found that 18% of men had been victims of domestic abuse compared with 13% of women.

When John is home, he gets a call from a friend of his who knew a man who had just been acquitted of date-rape. 30% of all reported date-rape allegation cases turn out to be false. The same is true of sexual harassment cases, where some women pursue the allegations simply to punish the man in question.

John himself knows a woman accused of GBH. In her case, she was given a lighter sentence because she was a single parent. John does not know any men who have escaped sentencing in this way, because it does not happen.

This kind of discrimination occurs across the world. Australian Kevin Guerds, who streaked across a football pitch was arrested and held for seven hours, while a woman guilty of the same offence escaped with a fine.

When John is driving to the shops later that evening, he is cut off by a female driver. This happens to John regularly and again statistics show John is not the one in the wrong. The crash rate of women drivers is twice that of men drivers, and even though drinking alcohol increases the crash rate of men by only 5%, the majority of those imprisoned under DUI laws are men, and women are almost never imprisoned for their much higher number of non-alcohol-related crashes.

The more John thinks about this type of discrimination, the more he realizes it is all around him, and that it seems little can be done about it. On any given night, bars, clubs and restaurants are institutionally prejudiced against men, and the Equal Opportunities Commission seems reluctant to step in, choosing instead to deal with enquiries such as ‘Can a pub refuse to serve a transsexual?’ and ‘Can a pub refuse to serve a woman a drink in a pint glass?’. These are seen as offences, but any question about male and female issues has wording to the effect that promotions such as ‘Ladies Night’ and ‘Free entry to anyone wearing a skirt’ are deemed legal.

By Jamie Watt