FALSE HOPES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 77, 1 April 1932, Page 7

FALSE HOPES.

CURE FOR CANCER. SURGEON'S WARNING. 111-Judged Declarations Have Pitiful Results. CONTROL OF GROWTH. (United I\A.—Electric Telegraph—Copyright) (Received 9.30 a.m.) LONDON, March 31. Sir Arthur Keith, the eminent British surgeon, interviewed by the "Daily Express," said: "I beg you not to raise false hopes regarding a cure for cancer. There are 100,000 sufferers in Britain, and the mass of appeals which follow every ill-judged declaration of a cure are pitiful. "Nevertheless, a young scientist at the Royal College of Surgeons has got hold of something big towards the control of the growth, and is now working with parathyroid extracts. "This means that in his experiments on animals he can develop and retard growth as he wishes. Whether the discovery will ultimately lead to control of the malignant growth remains to be 6een."

An Auckland doctor, who is specially interested in the study of cancer, said this morning when asked to comment on the cablegram, that there had been for some time a suspicion in the minds of those studying the cancer problem that there might be some connection between that disease and consumption. Although a good deal of attention bad been given to the problem they had not- so far been able to sheet home the connection between the two. It wbg impossible to say whether Dr. Cherry would be able to show more convincingly the suspected connection. On the cablegram alone there was not sufficient information to form a definite opinion, and further information would have to be awaited. The point was a very interesting one, and further details would be looked for with interest.

DIRECT RELATION. Expert's Theory of Cancer and Tuberculosis. LONG INVESTIGATION. CANBERRA, March 31. The direct relationship between cancer and tuberculosis is claimed to have been proved by Dr. Cherry, a cancer research fellow of Melbourne University. He told the Cancer Conference to-day that a long series of experiments had shown that the presence of tubercle bacilli was one of the factors which caused cancer.

Long investigations had proved conclusively that the sum of the combined death rate from cancer and tuberculosis remained nearly constant, the increase in deaths from cancer almost exactly replacing the diminishing numbers of deaths from tuberculosis.