The idea that the UK is a bad place to get treated as cancer seems to have been accepted as truth by certain sections of the media. It just isn’t : I’ve been trying to say so for a while with no success whatsoever. Anyway this editorial in the BMJ looks at the reliablity of the registers which are used to discern the data. Basically cancer statistics just aren’t that good in the UK. We make judgements on bad data at our peril.