If Big Pharma had unveiled a brand new drug that would stop 20% of cancer deaths, the hype would be enormous and the pressure to buy it, at an inevitably high cost, huge. But it exists - it's called aspirin, it costs almost nothing and the revelation of its potential failed to make most front pages

On my way home from work last night, I stopped at the chemist and bought a small plastic tub containing what appears to be the world's first genuine miracle drug. Low-dose aspirin. The tub contained 100 small pills, each one 75mg. It cost just over £1. If a team of researchers at Oxford University, publishing today in the Lancet medical journal are to be believed, taking one of these a day for at least five years and preferably much longer can cut your risk of cancer by 20% or more.

You would have thought the bunting would be flying from the lamp posts and champagne popping in the street. The Big C is supposed to be everybody's biggest dread. We are constantly exhorted to stop smoking, eat more fruit and vegetables and cut our weight - all of which would help save us from cancer, but which so many of us seem to find so hard to do. And now we have a once-a-day pill that can substantially reduce the risk - in the case of gastrointestinal cancer by over 50%.

And yet the coverage has been relatively subdued, the excitement level low. While the BBC's Today programme led its news bulletins with the story and Sky News did a package, the newspapers - with the exception of the Express which carries a weekly miracle pill story - failed to run it on the front pages. My story, under heavy competition with the latest from WikiLeaks, made page 8.

Why is this?

Familiarity breeds contempt, they say. We already know aspirin can help prevent heart attacks and stroke. People may feel they have heard it all before. The same Oxford team has also already published its findings on colorectal cancer, where regular aspirin-dosing cut deaths by a third.

Nonetheless, this comprehensive assessment across many cancers, from lung to stomach to oesophageal and pancreatic cancers - some of which carry very high death rates - has not been seen before. In fact, it is really extraordinary. If one of the major pharmaceutical companies had invented this pill, it would have been launched to a massive fanfare and subjected to huge media hype. And it would have been launched with an astronomical price tag.

The trouble with aspirin is that it's cheap. There's no profit to be made. The researchers, Professor Peter Rothwell from the department of clinical neurology at Oxford University and colleagues, received no pharma funding. Rothwell and Professor Peter Elwood, a well-known medical epidemiologist who has long had an interest in aspirin (personal as well as professional, since he started taking it himself in 1974) gave a briefing at the Science Media Centre in London and the Lancet put out a press release. And that's it.

Rothwell (who has also been taking aspirin for two years) and Elwood, because they are doctors, fought shy of urging people to go out and buy aspirin. There are risks of stomach bleeding - although they are far outweighed by the benefits, they believe. But, they said, it should not be for the researchers to give advice.

So who will? We will have to wait for official guidelines from the likes of Nice (the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence) in the UK - which are not always observed as they should be. But, as Rothwell and Elwood said, the man and woman in the street are capable of sifting the evidence (and assessing the risks) for themselves. Will the GP surgeries be jammed or the chemist shelves depleted? It will be interesting to see whether a single scientific paper can spark a grassroots health revolution.

• This article was amended on 7 December 2010. The original referred to 75g aspirin tablets. This has been corrected.