Gingernut and obgraham,
Thankyou for your informative responses.
The main purpose of my post was to basically draw it to peoples attention that at the end of the day you have to take control of your own health and request/arrange for screening for those diseases that commonly take people out.
My wife's radiation oncologist (who was her best oncologist by far) made a couple of general comments that have always stuck with me. The first was that a colonoscopy is the best 50th birthday present you can get. The second related to the the "big 4" types of cancer that generally take out males (in Australia at least) - these were (i) lung cancer; (ii) bowel cancer; (iii) prostate cancer; and (iv) melanoma. Lung cancer is one you don't generally get checked for but the other 3 should be incorporated into your overall health management and are relatively easy to screen in my opinion.
The point I am trying to make is that your GP, as your primary doctor, should be ensuring that (ii), (iii) and (iv) are checked at appropriate intervals but generally this doesn't happen.
I don't think you should have to present with rectal bleeding and find out you have bowel cancer at age 55. If your GP is doing his job he would have recommended you have a colonoscopy at 50 (although I believe 45 is better personally although I'm not a doctor) and hopefully any precursors to bowel cancer can be nipped in the bud much sooner.
This as you can probably see is an important issue to me.
Regards.
VH-MLE