Two weeks ago I wrote about the unequal sums and effort expended in battling breast and prostate cancers. There was some irony because I had to visit a breast-cancer unit with a lump in my chest. I spent an embarrassing day at the Royal United Hospital in Bath, where the professionalism of the staff was all one could expect and more. I’m awaiting the all-clear, but the lump appears to be benign.

But if being a man suffering a condition that allows me to benefit from a wonderful system set up for women makes me lucky, the same cannot be said for men with prostate cancer — a condition woefully neglected despite killing 10,000 men every year as against the 13,000 women claimed by breast cancer.

In the wake of the recent headlines over the breast cancer drug Herceptin, there was a development last week that received almost no press coverage. The Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) decided not to approve the drug Taxotere, in combination with the steroid prednisolone, for use against late-stage prostate cancer resistant to hormone therapy. So why did the SMC say no to Taxotere? After all, in its own estimation, it “offers improvements in survival, pain control and quality of life”. The snag? “Cost-effectiveness . . . has not been demonstrated.”

Men: because you’re not worth it.

Funnily enough, The Times reported on October 11 that the same drug had been approved by the SMC as a treatment for women with early-stage breast cancer. I know this comparison is simplistic, but it is also symbolic and matters outside Scotland because the SMC’s equivalent body, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, is considering whether to approve Taxotere for prostate sufferers in England and Wales.

So the SMC voted “yes” last month to Taxotere for breast-cancer treatment at a cost of £11,375 “per life year gained”, but “no” this month to prostate treatment at a cost of anything between £19,483 and £30,280. Few prostate sufferers are likely to use up a whole, pricey “life year”. Taxotere buys them maybe an extra 2½ months, which keeps the cost down to about £6,000. True, a precious few weeks isn’t much — unless, of course, they’re your precious few weeks. What was it that Ian Liddell-Grainger, Barbara Clark’s MP, said in the House of Commons on June 30, when he successfully badgered the Government into securing Herceptin for his “brave and intelligent” constituent? This was “a moral issue . . . if an individual is doomed to die, the decision about . . . any new treatment should be left to them”.

The Prostate Cancer Charity (PCC), “seriously concerned” at the SMC decision, would agree. But society, it said last week, was “at risk of making emotional responses to problems of channelling NHS funds — the bias being towards the groups that succeed in pulling the public’s heartstrings”.

Clark, said Dr Chris Hiley, of the PCC, was “heroic, attractive and articulate. She has got money out of the system. Rightly so. But society needs to have a debate about how the NHS budget is divided up. Otherwise, spending decisions will go in favour of children and women who are appealing, rather than older men . . .” (Or, she might have added, black men, who are three times as likely as white to suffer prostate cancer).

With a Government that jumps only when pressure groups bark, men should start barking — and black men might consider biting.

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