Alliance's giant inflatable bowel is coming to Bridington Spa
Humber and North Yorkshire Cancer Alliance is encouraging people across the region to get to the bottom of bowel cancer this April.
For Bowel Cancer Awareness Month, the alliance is taking its inflatable bowel – which is more than two metres tall and 3.5 metres long – to shopping centres and other community spaces to get people talking about bowel cancer and the importance of screening.
As part of the campaign, the inflatable bowel will be at Scarborough Spa on Monday, April 14 between 10am and 4pm and Bridlington Spa on Tuesday, April 29, between 10am and noon.
Bowel cancer is the third most common cancer in the UK. More than 16,800 people die from bowel cancer in the UK every year. It is the second biggest cancer killer in the UK but the number of people dying from the disease has been falling for several decades due to greater awareness. More than nine in 10 new cases (94%) are diagnosed in people over the age of 50. But bowel cancer can affect anyone of any age – more than 2,600 new cases are diagnosed in people under the age of 50 every year. Bowel cancer is treatable and curable especially if diagnosed early. Nearly everyone survives bowel cancer if diagnosed at the earliest stage. However, this drops significantly as the disease develops. The best way to reduce your risk of bowel cancer is to complete a bowel screening test when invited to do so. You use a home test kit, called a faecal immunochemical test (FIT), to collect a small sample of poo and send it to a laboratory. The sample is checked for blood, which can be a sign of polyps or bowel cancer.
Mark Hughes, clinical director at Humber & Yorkshire Coast Bowel Cancer Screening Centre, said: “Anyone who sees the bowel is going to want to know more. And they can, thanks to the information cards on the inflatable, and the knowledge and experience of the Cancer Alliance. "We want to make people aware of the symptoms of bowel cancer, which include changes in your poo, needing to go to the toilet to poo more or less often than what is normal for you, blood in your poo, tummy pain, losing weight without trying, and feeling really tired, for no apparent reason. If any of these symptoms have been troubling you for three weeks or more, please get in touch with your GP."