RESEARCH ON CANCER

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29907, 22 August 1962, Page 10

RESEARCH ON CANCER

Cigarettes And Air Pollution Research had shown that there was strong evidence that cigarette smoking was not the only major cause of lung cancer, but that air pollution could play a large part, said Dr. J. W. Cook, ViceChancellor of the University of Exeter and honorary medical director of the British Medical Research Council’s carcinogenic research unit, in an interview.

It had been established that city dwellers had a higher incidence of lung cancer than rural dwellers. This fact could support the air pollution theory.

Different findings in different countries indicated that a man could smoke moderately and live in a reasonably unpolluted atmosphere without real fear of contracting lung cancer. It had been shown that the absence of pollution reduced substantially the lung cancer rate among men who smoked fewer than 20 cigarette, a day, said Dr. Cook.

Cancer was no longer an incurable disease if an early diagnosis was made which allowed effective treatment by surgery or radiation. Because cancer was found in different parts of the body, diagnosis often was difficult.

Cancer was not just one disease, as commonly was thought; it was a whole host of diseases, he said. There was no single cause of cancer. At its simplest, it was a malignant change in organ cells, and different organs showed different manifestations of disease when these malignancies occurred.