Surgeon Asks Why “Little” Is Done To Stop Smoking

Press, Volume C, Issue 29436, 11 February 1961, Page 12

Surgeon Asks Why “Little” Is Done To Stop Smoking

(N.Z. Press Association) AUCKLAND, February 10. Why was almost nothing done about the cause of lung cancer—the commonest cancer afflicting the human body—when the cause of it was known? asked Mr G. Flavell at a sectional meeting of the British Medical Association today. Mr Flavell, formerly of New Zealand, is a prominent chest surgeon for several London hospitals. . Cancer of the lung killed five times as many persons as were killed annually on the roads in Britain, he said. In 1950 cancer of the lung was second to cancer of the breast, but now exceeded it. In Britain it accounted for a quarter of all deaths from cancer. It had increased 40 times in the last 30 years.

In the United States cancer of the lung caused 2500 deaths in 1930, 18.000 jn 1950. and more than 30,000 in 1959, he said. That pattern was confirmed in 16 other countries.

"The relationship between this appalling and increasing epidemic, which is surely one of the major international public health problems of the day, and cigarette smoking cannot be doubted by anyone who has troubled to read the formidable evidence, statistical, chemical, experimental, and pathological, now accumulated,” he said. Seven years ago the American Cancer Society had interviewed 200.000 men aged between 50 and 70, said Mr Flavell. Since then 12,000 had died. Among the nonsmokers there were 3.4 deaths

per 100,000. among cigarette smokers 78.6 deaths, among pipe smokers 28.9 deaths, among cigar smokers 11.4 deaths. The over-all death-rate was 105 per cent higher among smokers than non-smokers, deaths from heart disease 115 per cent, higher, and deaths from cancer of the lung 800 per cent, higher. It had been objected that though Americans smoked more than the English their cancer rate was not so high, said Mr Flavell. It was only in the last decade that cigarette smoking in the United States had outstripped that in England. It was what had happened 20 years ago that mattered.

"We know that today in England the cancer rate is higher in industrial towns

than in the country.” said Mr; Flavell. “But 20 years ago cigarette consumption in such towns was vastly greater than among the rural population. “Why, then, do we, who give so much lip service to preventive medicine, do so little to' prevent this most horrible of diseases?” he asked. “Is it because we are ourselves addicted to a drug hedged round by emotive and social sanction? Or is it the economic fact that the annual tobacco tax of £6oom in England nearly pays for the national health service?”

Treatment was gravely handicapped by late diagnosis because early symptoms were not sufficiently recognised, Mr Flavell said.