SEANAD:A SPECIAL Cabinet committee should be established to direct strategies for the prevention of diseases such as cancer, the Seanad Public Consultation Committee was told. Cutting the number of people diagnosed with cancer was possible, Mairéad Lyons, head of services with the Irish Cancer Society, said.

“It is critical that we take action without delay. We need Government to provide leadership in the area of cancer prevention and build a coalition of stockholders who can all contribute to reducing the number of people with cancer,” she said.

One in three Irish people would develop an invasive cancer at some point in their lives and one in four would die from it, she said.

The national cancer registry has predicted the number of new cases will rise to 38,000 per year by 2020 and to 64,000 by 2035.

“It is widely estimated that about a third of the most common cancers could be prevented by maintaining a healthy weight, eating well and being physically active,” said Ms Lyons.

Resources needed to be invested in the priority areas of health promotion and disease prevention – the likelihood of developing cancer could be reduced by 50 per cent if the economic, social, personal and environmental components of a public health strategy were designed to complement each other and reduce risk, she said.

The tobacco industry was specifically targeting young women, as shown by the kind of packaging used, said Kathleen O’Meara of the society.

Kate Allen, science and communications director of World Cancer Research Fund International, said there was a need to look at the external environment in which people made lifestyle choices. The restriction by Ireland of places where people could smoke was one example of how the incidence of cancer could be tackled.

Increasing a tax on energy-intense foods was not necessarily a “fat tax, because you just have a fat tax without taking a multinutrient approach”, she said. “You might end up with people eating things that have lots of sugar, lots of salt in them, so you need to look at the whole profile of the food.”

Investing in prevention now would result in a big saving down the line because it would end up with people being generally healthier, she said.