Two-year wait for full rollout of BreastCheck

THE national breast screening programme won’t be available in the south and west any sooner than the middle of 2007, BreastCheck director Tony O’Brien confirmed yesterday.

With the programme now detecting around six cancers in every 1,000 women screened, campaigners have been calling for the rollout to be speeded up, particularly in Cork where it was revealed this week that more than 4,000 women are waiting up to two years for a mammogram.

At the launch of BreastCheck’s 2004 annual report in Dublin, Mr O’Brien said: “Having demonstrated the benefits of a screening programme to 160,000 women it is clearly untenable to continue a situation where the programme is not available to the rest of the country.”