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Order! Order.

Hello there, I'm Alicia McCarthy, and this is today in Parliament from BBC Radio 4 for Friday the 16th of January,

where there's cross-party support for plans to improve treatments for rare cancers.

Patients would be amazed to find out that their data is not being used to find trials for

them. And that is where the public is and the law needs to catch up.

As Greenland's energy minister visits Westminster, a defence expert says President Trump's

claim that the US needs the island for security doesn't hold water.

It has a base there. It has over the years drawn down its presence there. So if there's any security

gap, the US bears partial responsibility for that. And peers ponder the safeguards in the assisted

dying bill. I don't want my children to tell me that I'm about to be killed, which would be

inconvenient in a number of respects. But first, peers have backed a bill to improve treatment and

research into rare cancers, which are defined as those affecting less than one in 2,000 people.

Under the plan, there'd be a legal duty on the health secretary to promote research, more data

sharing to improve access to clinical trials and a review into the regulations to encourage the

development of certain drugs. Introducing the bill in the Lords, Labour's Lady Elliot reckoned

it was a bit misleading to talk about rare cancers. Because they represent 47% of all UK cancer diagnosis, which is 180,000 people a year, being diagnosed with one of these rare cancers.

However, disproportionately they represent 55% of cancer deaths in the UK.

Lady Elliot said while there had been progress with several types of the disease,

for many rare cancers, treatment and survival rates had not improved for decades.

A conservative Lord Moylan explained there were difficulties in researching

them. The fact is that if people diagnosed with one of the less survivable cancers tend to die

...