DEFINITE IMPROVEMENT.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIX, Issue 46, 23 January 1939, Page 6

DEFINITE IMPROVEMENT.

CAMPAIGN AGAINST CANCER. PROGRESS IN AUSTRALIA. Per Press Association, WELLINGTON, Jan. 23. Interesting comments on the cancer campaign in Australia were made in an interview by Dr. Cumpston, Director-General of Public Health in Australia, who arrived to-day to attend the Cancer Conference opening in Wellington on February 14. He intends visiting Rotorua and the south, accompanied by his wife, and ho will be joined at the conference by two of his officers, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Eddy. He is interested in the work of the medical schools, and will visit that at Dunedin.

Dr. Cumpston said that some 21 leading Australian workers in the field of cancer would attend the conference in Wellington. He said that, with the central laboratory at Melbourne University, there was a branch of his department with three physicists working full-time in standardising the work of radium and X-rays, and also doing research work in the technical aspects of the use of both. Facilities were available at big hospitals in the capital cities, and they had also endeavoured to establish subcentres at some of the principal country towns there. In most of them the organisation was on the lines of the British Empire Cancer Campaign, which assisted the work considerably, and also they were now aiming to make available to every person throughout the Commonwealth the most modern facilities for the treatment of cancer. The results had been most encouraging, and Dr. Holmes would lie presenting a review of the situation to the conference. A detailed analysis of the results had shown, as was generally recognised, that in proportion as they could secure patients in the early stages of cancer so the results became more encouraging. They had a definite improvement each year in the figures of recovery.