CANCER patients' lives are being put at risk because Britain is lagging behind the rest of Europe and the US in providing vital scans, leading charities are warning.

The scans by the five positron emission tomography (Pet) machines are vital to give cancer sufferers a fighting chance of improving their treatment and survival.

But there are only five of the Pet scanners in use in the NHS - all in London - with others in research centres or the private sector.

Now, charities including Macmillan Cancer Relief, the British Lung Foundation and CancerBACUP, have joined forces to call on the Government to make sure more Pet scanners are available across England and Wales.

It comes only a month after The Northern Echo revealed that a new £1m brain scanner was lying idle because of staff shortages.

Bosses at the James Cook University Hospital, in Middlesbrough, admitted in October that the new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner, which arrived in the summer, had yet to be used on a single patient because there was no one trained to use it.

It adds to the radiotherapy crisis recently reported by The Royal College of Radiologists (RCR), which said that despite Department of Health and National Lottery money to update equipment, patients were still suffering due to staff shortages and a lack of machines.

The RCR report, which looked at equipment, workload and staffing for radiotherapy in the UK between 1997 and 2002, found that despite a 16 per cent increase in demand for treatment, megavoltage machines in clinical use for radiotherapy had only increased by ten per cent.

The high-tech Pet machines are used to either detect disease or to find out how widespread a disease, such as cancer or epilepsy, is in a patient's body.

The charities have called for scanners to be put in to at least 15 sites in Britain in the next three to five years.