THE Covid pandemic has made the outlook worse for people with the least survivable cancers such as pancreatic, stomach and brain cancer, campaigners have said.

A quarter of cancers in Britain have an average five-year survival rate of just 16 per cent and are often diagnosed late in emergency departments, the Less Survivable Cancers Taskforce (LSCT) said yesterday.

The charity coalition said that about 3 per cent of breast and 8 per cent of prostate cancers are diagnosed in an emergency; but this jumps to 53 per cent for pancreatic cancer or cancers of the central nervous system (including the brain), 45 per cent for liver, 35 per cent for lung, 30 per cent for stomach and 21 per cent for oesophageal cancers.