GOITRE RESEARCH

Hawera Star, Volume XLVII, 23 June 1928, Page 13

GOITRE RESEARCH

PROFESSOR. D. W. Cannalt-Jones (Otago University), who is at present in London, react a paper on the subject of Goitre before the Section ot Medicine or the Ro.wtl Society, of .Medicine. rle gave an account of the work in New Zealand, where, as lie said, the first thing that strikes the eye oi a stranger in the streets is the preponderance of goitres. it has been stated that Maoris do not sutler fr m the complaint, but althongn this., is true or tlie coastal Maoris, those who have been driven inland lia.e had in their language a word for goitre as Jong as tradition goes la k. . Jn a recent survey of 3()U of them, 18 per cent, of them were iound to have enlarged thyroids. The pre.alence among Europeans has been n ti.ed since 1888, and 1500 men were refused for the jinny out of some 130,000 examined when conscription came in during the war. Whatever the environmental factor may be, it does not act uniformly all over the islands, for the incidence among schoolchildren is 16 per cent in Auckland and 28 per cent, in Wellington, rising to 53 per cent, around Canterbury. With a selective regional incidence like this, research workers have something to go on.

I 1 aecal contamination in the drinking water was excluded by the fact that ( liristclnmli has quite as good a standard of water supply as Auckland. Radio-activity of the water from artesian wells was .put out of court by the fact that the incidence was 60 per cent, in an area, where the water runs ireelv in the open. The incidence was high' in places where the water-supply was taken entirely from the roofs, and lowest of all in a limestone district, so the suggestion that the salts in the water had some aotiological significance could be disregarded.

WORK IN DOMINION

- Diet is strikingly uniform all over | the country, said Dr. Carmalt-Jojies, and could not be held responsible for a condition with such variations in degree. Ueoogical considerations put forward in Europe could not now hold Jor .New Zealand, but as soon as Dr. Herons examined samples of soil of the different districts for iodine-content, a striking parallelism between low soil iodine and high goitre-rate was manilest. The preventive treatment, thereto re, was to add iodine to the food, and early failures in this direction had been .omul to be due to overdosage. The, amount required was minute, four parts per million being the proportion allowed by the Health Department. The problem of toxic goitre, Dr. Carmalt.bines pointed out, is much more complicated, and an overdose of iodine in simple goitre may well produce serious toxic symptoms.

In the subsequent discussion, Dr. Scott Williamson said that the endemic goitre in India is quite certainly not the endemic goitre of New Zealand. M-Garrison had found an abundance of iodine in the soil and the vegetable lood, and his work was as convincing as that of the New Zealand workers. Dutch investigators had made the interesting observation that those who are susceptible to toxic goitre in Holland are all immigrants, in the third generation, from Switzerland, whose ancestors were liable to simple goitre. .Ancestral predisposition possibly plays | a part in causing the condition, and, as Dr Williamson said, there seems little doubt that simple goitre .can arise fiom a .number of causes. It may he that there are two quite different t.pes, with different aetiology and different pathology. It is by careful work of the kind done in New Zealand that we shall reach more definite conclusions.