Breast cancer screening guidelines discriminate against families like mine | Brief letters

Calls for changes to breast cancer guidelines for GPs are welcome (Report, 4 August). The existing guidelines are irrational. If your grandmother and mother have both had breast cancer, you are still not added to the intensified screening list unless an aunt or great-aunt or sister has also had breast cancer. Hence the system discriminates against families – like mine – with only one woman in a generation.Helen HillsYork It seems that Anna Tims’s correspondent committed the wrong environmental crime (I was fined £500 after putting a coffee cup in a rubbish bag next to a full bin, 3 August). Instead of unwittingly littering, they should have dumped thousands of tonnes of sewage into a river and bagged a multimillion-pound reward.Matt SheardTayport, Fife As a interested follower of the regular letters from the owner of the Gordon Bennett, I offer my sympathies for the loss of his wife and share his frustration at the uncooperative stance of the Canal and River Trust (Letters, 9 July). I write this on the anniversary of my own wife’s death.JK MitchellDinton, Buckinghamshire Commiserations to Ian Grieve on board the Gordon Bennett. He could add to the Nick Cave/Neil Young playlist celebrating his wife’s life. Cave’s The Ship Song and Young’s Birds are sad but also uplifting, like his letter. Jim HatleyBrighton, East Sussex My mother used to say people with short or long illnesses (Letters, 7 August) “enjoyed ill health”.Rory MurphyLondon