Humber and North Yorkshire Cancer Alliance’s giant inflatable bowel is coming to a town near you this Bowel Cancer Awareness Month 

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 Cancer 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 well as raising awareness of the signs and symptoms.  

This is where the inflatable bowel will be heading to during April:  

 There will also be targeted engagement sessions with groups least likely to take up bowel screening in York and Grimsby.  

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. Polyps are growths in the bowel which may turn into cancer over time.  

If you receive a test through the post, it is important that you complete and return it. This year, the starting age to receive a FIT in the post has dropped from 54 to 50 across the region and will soon become the national norm. People continue to receive the kits in the post every two years until they reach 74. 

One person who is a firm believer in the FIT screening programme is Gill Dickinson. Gill, 62, from Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire, was 60 when found out she had bowel cancer. Had it not been for the FIT kit she routinely received in the post, she might not have known she had bowel cancer until it was too late.   

Gill said: "I had no symptoms at all. So, I was totally shocked when the result came back abnormal, and I was then diagnosed with bowel cancer. Thankfully, it's been caught early so I think I am going to be OK, but I'm forever grateful for the timing of that little test that came in the post. It’s so worth those potential few minutes of embarrassment to take the test, believe me." 

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." 

The Cancer Alliance's Cancer Champions team will be hosting bite-sized versions of their online awareness sessions, and messages will be shared across the Cancer Alliance's social media channels too. Follow the Cancer Alliance on Facebook and X to help share these messages.   

If you or a loved one needs information on, or support for bowel cancer, visit the Cancer Alliance website to be signposted to local bowel cancer support groups.  

You can also help the Cancer Alliance by completing surveys on cancer experience of care, and attitudes to cancer.  

Visit the Cancer Alliance’s website to find out more about its Bowel Cancer Awareness Month campaign activity.