Village Helps In Cancer Fight

Families have turned their little community into a village of life.......by gathering yew clippings from their hedges.

While people across the rest of the country think about holidays and sunbathing,the residents in one Northamptonshire village have a lot more important things on their mind.

Their summer is spent helping to cure of one of the world's biggest killers - cancer.

Ten families in the village collect yew clippings to produce the anti-cancer drug taxotere.

They collect it for a Dorset-based specialist firm who put the stuff through a complex process where a substance found in the bark called baccatine is extracted,refined and has chemicals added to it to produce taxotere.

Taxotere is then used in the treatment of breast cancer and ovarian cancer because it has properties which can inhibit the growth of cancer cells.

Susan Bailey,48,decided to try and organise the collections after reading about the importance of yews in a newspaper in 1996.

"At that time a friend of my mother was suffering from breast cancer and was taking a taxotere-based drug.

"I could see we had a lot of yew trees in our village which probably date back hundreds of years and I wondered if there was a way I could help."

Mrs Bailey,who is married to Andrew,an engineer,and has two children,Jade,18,and Joel,15,said "It is a very exacting process and you have to be very careful about how you go about it.

"First of all the yew itself has to be an English yew with the scientific name taxus baccata.

"Then you have to collect it at the right time of year which is usually late July,August or early September when the active ingredient in the yew is at its height.

"Next it is important to organise your clipping on a dry day and get it done all at once."

In Hargrave,families armed with hedge clippers or electric hedge trimmers gather around their bushes and fill huge numbered sacks with the foliage.

Mrs Bailey said "It is very important that you cut only the very thin and green new growth on the yew and not the older,thicker,woodier branches."

She said they receive about 35p for every kilogram of clippings,money which they donate to charities such as Macmillan Cancer Relief and Marie Curie Cancer Care.

The clippings are frozen or dried at a specialist plant before being shipped to France to be commercially processed into taxotere.

Mrs Bailey said "Collecting the clippings is a quite laborious job and it can take the best part of a day to fill one of the sacks.

"But the reason we do it is because the drug which is created from the clippings can be a life-saving treatment for people with cancer. That's what makes it worthwhile."