Health promotion teams will stimulate, support and deliver local action. Accelerated action on smoking and diet will help drive down rates of heart disease. Cancer Prevention and Screening 64. Cancer has recently overtaken coronary heart disease as the commonest cause of death in Scotland. Lung cancer is now the commonest cause of cancer death in both sexes, followed by breast cancer in women and colorectal cancer in men.
Skin cancer is also on the increase.
The measures described in the White Paper, Tobacco Kills , will be fully implemented in Scotland as part of a major assault on cancer prevention with particular reference to lung cancer. As described elsewhere in this White Paper, every effort will be made to improve Scotland's diet and so diminish another major cancer risk factor. Scotland already has successful national screening programmes aimed at the early detection of breast and cervical cancer. As part of their attack on cancer, the Government will now establish a demonstration screening project for the early detection of colorectal cancer, a disease which some 3000 Scots develop each year. What is needed is the demonstration that such screening programmes offer a feasible, safe and effective proposition when used outwith the confines of a controlled trial to safeguard the health of populations.