Greater awareness, funding and research is being called for to fight what is called “the world’s toughest cancer” on World Pancreatic Cancer Day.
To coincide with the awareness day, the charity Pancreatic Cancer Action has released results of a new patient survey, finding nearly half (43 per cent) of people had never even heard of the disease before their diagnosis.
In the latest statistics for Yorkshire from 2014, only 40 people survived out of 795 after being diagnosed with the cancer.
In 2015, an estimated 367,000 cases of pancreatic cancer were diagnosed globally, and by 2020, an estimated 418,000 new cases will be diagnosed.
Pancreatic cancer has the lowest survival rate among all major cancers, and in nearly every country including the UK, it’s the only one with a single digit five-year survival rate (2-9 per cent).