Screening for lung cancer is a controversial idea

IT CAN START with something as trivial as a small cough that will not go away. But often lung cancers cause no symptoms at all until it is too late. Ask Graham Thomas, who in 2014 found that hiding behind his pneumonia was a lung cancer at stage IV of its development. Stage IV is medical jargon for a tumour which has spread to other parts of the body. There is no stage V.

Mr Thomas now speaks out as part of a campaign by the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation, a charity, to raise awareness about the illness in Britain. He started smoking at 14, and says people think he brought his illness on himself and that it is the cancer least deserving of sympathy. But he argues that perhaps it should not be, because it is the cancer that kills the most.