George Alagiah taking break from BBC News after cancer spread

The newsreader was diagnosed back in 2014

Presenter George Alagiah has announced that he will be taking a break from BBC News as his cancer has spread. Alagiah, 65, was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer back in 2014 and despite having made progress, it returned in 2017. Now, in a statement from his agent, he is set to "take a break from studio duties to deal with a further spread of cancer." https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1450085343286468614?s=20 The statement goes on to read that "his medical team had decided to hit the new tumour ‘hard and fast’. He is due to undergo a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy over the next few months." Alagiah himself commented that presenting the news "has kept me sane over the last few years" insisting that he is "determined to come back.” Back in March of 2020, he spoke to a fellow BBC reporter about the struggles of living with cancer throughout the pandemic, revealing that he had contracted coronavirus. https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1245079350254481408?s=20 His experience of getting Covid while already having another serious illness also features in Natasha Kaplinsky's new book, Letters From Lockdown. Alagiah has been a presenter for the BBC News at Six 2007 and was previously the main anchor for the BBC World News' GMT throughout the entirety of its nine-year run from 2010-2019. We wish him a speedy recovery and hope to see him back on the box soon.

Related links

• Colin Powell: Former US Secretary of State dies due to complications from Covid-19
• New Zealand rugby star Sean Wainui dies in car crash, aged 25
• Will Young says Grand Tour's Richard Hammond is ‘the worst’ for ‘homophobic jokes’