Senior experts on cancer have defended the UK's record on survival from cancer against claims that it is among the worst in the Western world.

Michel Coleman, professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said this month's headline grabbing report by Karolinska Institute researchers claiming that the United Kingdom was languishing near the bottom of the rich countries league table for cancer survival was “statistically crude and incorrect.”

“We don't accept their results,” Professor Coleman said. “For France they claimed [that] the five year, all cancer survival for women was 71%. If you tell French cancer specialists that they will laugh in your face.”

Mike Richards, the UK government's clinical director for cancer, noted that some of the Swedish researchers' statistics on survival, which linked poor outcomes in the …