Liver cancer is the fifth most common cancer in the world. People infected with hepatitis B and hepatitis C virus, or those who have damaged their livers with alcohol, are most at risk of liver cancer. Because there is no reliable screening test, cases of liver cancer are often not diagnosed till well advanced, which makes for a high mortality rate. Those at risk are often tested for a protein called alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) but this can give rise to false positives (diagnosing liver cancer in those who do not actually have the disease).
