BREAST cancer is the biggest single killer of women in Britain. It affects one in 10 of them and 13,000 a year die from it. The best weapon against the disease is early detection It is a fact proven by the decrease in breast-cancer death rates in recent years -- which fell by a fifth in the North West during the 1990s.

And for this improvement to increase, it is, surely, vital for breast screening to be automatically available to every woman in the at-risk over-50 age group -- and, above all, to the most vulnerable.

They are the ones aged 65-plus. Yet, though the Government has set health authorities an April, 2004, deadline for extending invitations for regular screening to all women aged under 70, those aged 70-plus will not be offered it -- unless they ask.

Lancashire's 'champion' for the elderly, County Councillor Dorothy Westell, of Accrington, says this is discrimination against the over-70s and wants them to be included.

But although the Government has embarked on extending screening to more women than ever before, County Coun Westell is right to call for it to be offered to all.

For, as she points out, only three out of four women who are invited take up the offer and automatic invitations to every woman would reduce the likelihood of those who have to request screening themselves putting it off. In short, she believes more lives could and would be saved.

And, surely, that goal should be given maximum effort -- just as County Coun Westell rightly demands.