Women with breast cancer have faced staggering travel insurance premiums for years, often leaving them unable to take a well-earned break or forcing them to travel without insurance.

Every year, over 44,600 women are diagnosed with the condition in the UK and on average, one in nine women will develop the disease at some point in their lives, say breastcancercare.

But insurance companies often charge massive premiums for sufferers wishing to travel abroad and, according to Macmillan Cancer Support, many women also feel the insurers ask insensitive questions when calculating their premium.

However, a new travel policy from Equity Insurance, called insurepink could mean an end to crippling travel costs for sufferers. It has been developed by Fiona MacRae, 45, a woman with a first-hand experience of living with the cancer and promises to be more understanding than the main insurers.

Mainstream premiums are often high as insurers classify cancer patients as high risk. They consider pre-exisiting medical conditions as evidence that a claim for medical care will be more likely when travelling.

But insurepink promises to reflect the true risks of holiday travel, not the perceived risk of travelling with a severe condition.

Insurepink are also targeting people who do not have the condition but want to support the cause and will be donating £1 to the Pink Ribbon Foundation for every travel policy sold and £10 for every car or home insurance policy sold before October 1st 2008.

Ms MacRae, told the Times she designed the new policy after being quoted a premium of more than than £300 to cover a week’s holiday in France with her family, months after receiving treatment. She said: “Even if you have been out of treatment for five years, you can still get whacked on premiums. They say that cancer is high risk for travel insurance but it is not really, not like life cover. You are just going on holiday.”

“At the moment, insurers have a broad-brush approach. But cancer is an umbrella term for 200 diseases that all react differently. Insurers need to assess risk more specifically, and price accordingly.”

Ms MacRae also believes that the questions mainstream insurers ask are not appropriate for accurately determining a person’s risk. For example, most insurers will ask how many times a person has visited the doctor in the past year to determine how likely they are to need medical attention whilst travelling.

“Of course they have been to the doctor,” she told the Times. “Going to the doctor a lot could mean they are less likely to need care on holiday, because they are actively being looked after.” Insurepink has dropped questions that it believes are unhelpful in determining risk and has introduced new ones based on a patients medication.

The Equity Insurance Group is also gathering more statistical data to develop policies for sufferers of other cancers, such as men with prostate cancer. Neil Utley, the group’s chief executive, told the Times: “We are investigating areas of the market poorly served by fair pricing.”

According to Jonathan French, from the Association of British Insurers, the insurance industry as a whole is trying to improve cover for patients with preexisiting medical conditions. In an interview with the Times he said: “When applying for travel insurance, people are obliged to disclose preexisting conditions, or the policy is invalid. We are trying to make things better... but it is important to note that people can get cover. There are plenty of specialist providers. The difficulty has been people not knowing their options.”

He added that cancer charities, such as Macmillan Cancer Support, often have information about which insurers specialise in cover for cancer patients.

For more information on breast cancer, visit: www.insurepink.co.uk.

Medical insurance can cover breast cancer and other cancers, subject to the usual medical policy exclusions - such as if the condition was pre-existing or subject to a qualifying period. With so much controvosy about the postcode lottery when it comes to breast and other cancer treatments, many individuals are turning to private medical insurance to ensure that they are covered in the unfortunate circumstance of succumbing the disease.

Hot on the heels of the previous article on HPV vaccinations for teenagers, a multitude of information about the virus and cervical cancer is hitting the public awareness. Every year around 4,000 women in the UK are diagnosed with cervical cancer, of whom, around 1,200 die from the disease. Generally, only 2 out of every 1,000 cancers diagnosed in women are cervical cancers, but it is the second most common cancer in women under the age of 35.

Cervical cancer is most commonly spread through the human papilloma virus, or HPV - generally known as the wart virus. HPVs are a group of more than 100 different viruses and they are given numbers to distinguish them. In this group, only 13 HPVs are capable of causing cancer and only five types commonly do so. In 70 to 80 per cent of cases of cervical cancer there is an association with an infection from HPV 16 and 18.

The viruses can be spread through any skin-to-skin contact, but when they affect the cervix it is spread through sexual intercourse. Evidence shows that as much as 80 per cent of women will contract some form of the virus before the age of 50, but in many cases the infection will clear up on its own.

A woman’s sexual behaviour may determine how much she is at risk from HPV. Early infection, commonly due to having sex at an early age, is shown to increase the likelihood of persistent infection and possible malignancy. If a woman is over 30 years old, she is also at a higher risk if HPV cultures remain in her cervix, although women of this age are less likely to contract the virus.

The number of sexual partners and sexual histories of those partners are also linked to the risk of HPV, as well as having sex with uncircumcised males as they are thought to be more likely to harbour the virus. Women who smoke and contract the HPV virus are also twice as likely to develop cervical cancer than a non-smoker.

HPV can be present for years with no symptoms and the viruses do not always cause obvious symptoms such as warts, so a person can have the infection and unknowingly pass it on. Recent studies have also shown that condoms do not completely protect against HPV as the virus can be spread through skin-to-skin contact with any infected area of the body.

The virus can also lay dormant for many years before it comes active, with the most common age of deaths due to the cancer in the early fifties. With girls becoming sexually active at a much younger age, the early vaccination scheme recently introduced by the Government is essential to cut the death rate for this disease.

Many experts argue that the programme should be extended to pre-pubescent boys, as well as girls, as the same types of HPV virus that cause cervical cancer are also linked to many cases of penile cancer in men, and to oral and anal cancer in both sexes.

The NHS are also considering introducing HPV testing for women with borderline or abnormal smears.

Cancer organisations Cancer Help and Cancer.org have more information about the HPV virus and Cervical Cancer.