A state health care advocacy group has asked former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani to pull his latest radio ad, in which he cites inaccurate public health statistics.

In the radio ad, Giuliani, a Republican presidential candidate, talks about his battle with prostate cancer, using it as a springboard to explain why he thinks his health care plan is superior to plans proposed by Democratic presidential candidates, which he calls "socialized medicine."

"I had prostate cancer five, six years ago," Giuliani says in the ad. "My chance of surviving prostate cancer - and, thank God, I was cured of it - in the United States? Eighty-two percent. My chance of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent under socialized medicine."

But according to Great Britain's Office for National Statistics, the five-year survival rate for prostate cancer is actually about 75 percent. And some doctors have said it's unfair to compare the rates between the two countries, since the United States has a more aggressive screening policy, which results in more successful treatment due to early detection.

New Hampshire for Health Care, a nonpartisan group that sends volunteers in purple T-shirts to presidential campaign events to ask health care questions, called on Giuliani to stop running the ad. Zandra Rice Hawkins, communications director for the group, said she asked Giuliani about the numbers at a campaign stop in Nashua on Wednesday.

"He didn't seem concerned about the inaccuracy at all," she said. "It's clear the campaign isn't taking us very seriously."

John Thyng, state director of New Hampshire for Health Care, said Giuliani should fix the numbers or pull the ad.

"What we need are real solutions to our health care crisis from the presidential candidates - not scare tactics and misleading information," he said in a statement.

The Giuliani campaign intends to keep running the ad.

"The bottom line is, Rudy's ad illustrates the point that Americans are better off in the U.S. system than the European system," said Jeff Grappone, New Hampshire spokesman for the Giuliani campaign. "You are better off in a system of competition and choice rather than a government-mandated health care system."

Giuliani has said he relied on figures in an article from the summer 2007 edition of City Journal, published by a conservative research group called the Manhattan Institute.

An article written by Dr. David Gratzer, a Giuliani campaign adviser, states that the U.S. prostate cancer survival rate is 81.2 percent and that the British survival rate is 44.3 percent.

Gratzer has told reporters that he based his figures on a study by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit group that researches health care policy.

But the Commonwealth Fund said the figures didn't come from its reports. They can't accurately be calculated from the seven-year-old report Gratzer references, said Dr. Stephen Schoenbaum, executive vice president for programs at the Commonwealth Fund.

"The figures that they're working on (are) not correctly derived," he said. "They're also old numbers. The numbers are possibly changing."

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