STAMPING OUT GOITRE.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18015, 6 March 1924, Page 4

STAMPING OUT GOITRE.

experiments with lODINE. LESSONS FROM ANIMALS. Apropos of the discussion on goitre wliich took place at Tuesday's sitting of the Medical Conference at Auckland, an interesting reference to the mysteries of the disease and the fight being waged in the effort to discover cures was made by the president of the Royal Society of Medicine, Sir "William* Hale-White, at the annual dinner of the organisation in London. .The president said that the year 1923 had been a memorable one in the history of the society, for it had broken n«w ground in two directions. Realising that there was no clear-cut speciality, and that many of the diseases—of the eye, for tnstance—were only part of the general condition of the" whole body, the twenty-four sections of the society had now been brought into closer co-operation, and this, 0 he anticipated, would add not only to the usefulness but to the renown of the society. _ As to the other direction in which new "round had been broken, he said that it was one of the most extraordinary things in the history of medicine "that from time immemorial diseases of animals and diseases of man had been treated separately. Indeed, it was only in recent times that diseases of animals had been properly studied at all. This was the more extraordinary, because several people—for example, Jenner, with his work on cow-pox and human small-pox—had shown that diseases of animals and diseases of man were in ma-ny respects similar. On the other hand, they frequently differed. In natural science knowledge was acquired bv observation of how phenomena resembled one another and how they differed from one another. Clearly it could only be to their advantage in their enquiries as to the detriment of disease that they should study disease as it existed both in animals and in man. Disease, after all, was no thing but a perversion of the normal processes of life, whether in the vegetable or in the animal kingdom. There was a unity in disease which should be studied as a biological whole. Taking as an instance that common disease, simple goitre, lie said it was so common thai people Tinew it when they saw it. Probably a million people'had it. It was an enlargement of the thyroid gland. When it was present there was no iodine in the gland, and when the gland was healthy there was iodine. Experimenters had observed lately that if a mother dog had iodine completely withheld from the food the puppies would haive goitre. On the edge of Lake Michigan sheep began to have goitre, but with iodine the goitre disappeared. In the same way trout were likely to be destroyed but when a little iodwie was added to the water the goitre was stopped and the trout recovered.

In many parts of France, Switzerland and America, where goitre was present, an attempt was being made to completely eradicate th<r* disease in man and animals by seeing that the food contained a minute amount of iodine. "If this small experiment on man and animals turns out successful in the way that it looks as though it may," Sir* William observed, "we shall owe to a combined study of diseases in animals and man the complete extinction of simple goitre from animals and man." . There would, he added, no longer be the hideous dwarfs who existed where cretinism was present. They might learn how to get rid of some diseases by learning how the animals did not get them.