News

OC makes headline news

I'm sure many of you were as surprised as me to see ovarian cancer getting headline coverage on 15th November. I woke up to find BBC News running the story in their breakfast news headlines - we were even the first non-war story! News at Ten and the BBC evening news both carried long reports about ovarian cancer, and interviewed patients. Prof. Ian Jacobs, our trustee and Director of the UK ovarian cancer screening project, was also interviewed. Ian talked about how screening had made a difference to cervical cancer, and said, "Now we hope to see this improvement matched in ovarian cancer.

The story began as a press release from the Cancer Research Campaign, calling for more attention to be given to ovarian cancer. It was released to coincide with the London conference of the British Gynaecological Cancer Society, of which lan is President, and which our Chairperson Louise and member Ruth Payne both attended. The story highlighted the rise in ovarian cancer cases in England and Wales in the last twenty years. Our own Ruth Payne was interviewed by ITN - you may have heard her interview on Classic FM too, the office was flooded with calls from journalists wanting us to find women with ovarian cancer they could talk to.

Many national newspapers picked up the story: ‘Steep rise in ovarian cancer cases' (Daily Telegraph, 15th November), ‘Ovarian cancer up by a fifth (Birmingham Post), and I m sure that many of you will have seen local coverage of the story. For those on the web, there was a good article on the BBC News site (www.bbc.u.k./news - search for ‘ovarian cancer' ) and we managed to get Ovacome linked to the article so that people could find us if they wanted more information. It was good to see attention turned to ovarian cancer - it s not often that we have a high profile at national level. Some of the stories were also well put together - they emphasised the difficulty in diagnosing the disease, and how screening was at an early stage in development.

It's sad that the statistics - a 20% rise in ovarian cancer cases over the last 20 years - appear to be the only way of drawing attention to ovarian cancer cases. On a more positive note, Ovacome had a chance to influence stories by having members talk about their experiences. It is important to us that we have people we can call who are willing to do this - please have a think, and let us know if you would be willing to talk about your story in future.
Editor s note: if anyone who has been interviewed by the press could write in to tell us about their experience, we may be able to encourage more women to speak to the media.