WAR AGAINST CANCER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19390, 27 July 1926, Page 12

WAR AGAINST CANCER.

DR. MAYO'S OPINION

"ONLY ON THE WAY."

REVIEW OF RECENT PROGRESS,

[from our own correspondent. ] VANCOUVER, July 2. Medical science and the ordinary layman will take heart from statements credited to Dr. Charles Mayo, of the famous Rochester clinic, on the subject of cancer, of which he is held to be one of the best authorities in the world to-day. His statements are, by a coincidence, attended by an announcement that the lata New York restaurant millionaire, Mr. Sherry, has bequeathed £300,000 to can-

cer research. "I wish I might say," remarked the noted surgeon-, "that we are definitely or, the road to the mastery of this scourge on mankind. I hope we are; I believe we are; but, as yet , we are only on the

way. With the remarkable progress our scientists have made in recent years, we are still unable to say that our discoveries have worked out to a settled conclusion. "But. when you consider that, of the 92 elements that make up the known world to-day, only two are still unrecognised, and, when you look about yon in the world of science and research and observe the almost miraculous uncovering of the mysteries hidden since the Garden of Eden, one must entertain the highest hopes that we shall know all about cancer in a few years. "Deaths from canecr in the United States number about 100,000 annually, a large* figure, but not unnecessarily alarming, on a population of 112 million people. But medical science is proceeding on the assumption that there must be some way of saving some of these unfortunate people There is. Some, day we shall know.

" We have been able to cut down the mortality ftrom cancer remarkably, as things are. In 30 of the large hospitals of the United States originally 80 per cent, of affections in a certain part of the body were malignant. The percentage had been reduced to 52 per cent, by early treatment.

"Dr. John Joseph Bloodgood, of John Hopkins Foundation, has reduced the death rate of cancer of the month by 50 per cent. That is, where we have been able to discover the cancerous growth in time, we have succeeded in eliminating it.

" But what concerns us most is that one-third of all Cancer occurs in the stomach. Only 24 per cent, originate in the skin, 10Jy per cent, in the breast, and 21 per cent, in the reproductive organs (if women. It is the internal cancer that' bothers us most, for cancer may attack the stomach for a long period before wo know anything about it. " Ultimately, it seems to me, we shall proceed to a method of diagnosis compar-' able to the Wasserman test, whereby W can detect cancerous development in the stomach at its inception. But what cancer, is, what nourishes it, what this particular bacteria or germ is, the profession is yet unable to say."