MUST HAVE RADIUM

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 46, 1 September 1928, Page 11

MUST HAVE RADIUM

DOCTOR INSISTENT BEST CANCER TREATMENT (From "The Post's" Representative) LONDON, 27th July. Dr. C. \V. Saleeby writes in .. the ''Daily Mail":— ... ■ . "Beyond all dispute if the Oaneer Conference had a hero that hero was radium. "Despised and decried for years, radium now definitely undertakes to relieve the victim of cancer of the tongue or- cancer of the womb from the ghastly ministrations of. the surgeons, and can safely achieve results vastly superior to their appallingly dangerous best. Let us thank Heaven for that.. • , . "Nor should wo forget that women doctors have done magnificent service, especially to their own sex, in helping to establish .radium —though no one would guess from the conference proceedings what the women's share had been. "Wherever cancer is treated, there radium should be available. The day before the conference I published tho ■ prediction that the many surgeons who then decried radium would not decry it a week later, nor ever again. The discussions were final and constitute. the one positive achievement of a lamentably disappointing week. "Radium is very dear and very scarce. It is only available as yet for a tiny proportion of the vast host who need it. Medical and other women have lately asked for money' for' radium and have had a, miserably poor response. So long, as we continue to ignore tho prevention of cancer we must have radium. NECESSITY FOE SUPPLY. "On very high authority I learn that the principal source of radium at present is the Belgian Congo. Our own immediately adjoining territories might yield radium. ....-.' Sir Ernest Butherford, F.K.S., the world famous student of radio-activity, is undertaking the chairmanship of a committee, under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, which will, inter alia, make geological and chemical inquiries in the hope of obtaining British Empire radium, so to say, for no less a purpose than the cure of large numbers of cases of cancer to whom radium offers by far tho best, if not tho only chance of life. . : "We must have radium.' Either through a national radium fund or an allocation made by the-Exchequer,'as1 is the case with munitions in an ordinary transient war. That would, be a long business, I fear, with vested interests in the.way.. "If the conference had -been conducted on the usual lines which lead to success its final meeting would have discussed this ques.tion, which would' not have been left to be dealt with by1 any single pen, <pr even by any single news-' paper. ;.' ' ' ' '. "''.-■ '."". "But, somehow or other, we must have radium."