BREAST cancer is the most common cancer in the UK. It affects about 50,000 women in Britain each year, most are over 50, but younger women are not immune and in rare cases men can be struck too.

So everyone should have a reason for getting behind next month’s Breast Cancer Campaign.

York based Think Pink is holding a number of fundraising events and we hope people will lend their support because money is badly needed to help researchers plug some critical gaps.

Most notably we need to find ways of identifying those women who are most at risk, understanding better how preventive drugs work, together with new ways of helping women make lifestyle changes to lower their risk.

And we need to move quickly. In the UK, 138 women are told they have breast cancer every day, but as Rachel Bruce and Zoe Bounds tell us today, support networks for this particular cancer are woefully thin on the ground. If the shock of being told they had a tumour wasn’t enough, there was nowhere in York to share their experiences of going for treatment, which is why the pair formed Breast Friends and they too are planing events to tie in with Breast Cancer Campaign.

The charity has a stated aim of more precisely predicting a woman’s risk of getting the disease and prevent up to 20 per cent of all breast cancers by 2025. But to do that, everyone must play their part, which is why we are urging everyone to think pink. And not only during October.