The parents of a boy who sparked a manhunt when they removed him from Britain where he was being treated for cancer said he was now free of the disease after receiving proton beam therapy. Ashya King, five, was treated for a brain tumour at a medical centre in Prague last year after his parents took him away from a British hospital fearing that the proposed course of radiotherapy would make him worse. The family's Spanish lawyer Juan Isidro Fernandez Diaz said King, who has been recovering with his parents in Spain, was doing "very well". "The tumour has been completely neutralised and it no longer has cancerous cells," the lawyer said. Supporters of proton beam therapy say it is more precise than conventional radiotherapy and targets only malignant cells, although scientific opinion is divided on whether it improves survival rates. It is not available through Britain's state-run National Health Service. "Now we are so full of hope for the future," Naghemeh King told Britain's Sun newspaper. The Prague Proton Therapy Centre said Ashya was doing well but it was "premature" to take a medical view on his long-term prospects.
