Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1914.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIX, Issue 10887, 27 February 1914, Page 4

Rangitikei Advocate. TWO EDITIONS DAILY. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 27, 1914.

IT has been state! that radium is a present at a flotititious price engineered by speculators ami that really instead of £ls to £2O per milligramme, it might be sold at a profit at a few shillings. In a careful article in a recent number of the British Medical Journal this statement is disonssed at some length. It is acknowledged in the first place that the present price is inflated and bears a more or lees speculative relation to the scarcity of uranium minerals r-ather than a real relation to the cost of extraction, though this, owing to the necessity for skilled operators and expensive machinery, is considerable. Radium follows exclusively the occurrence of uranium and maintains a ratio of about 3or 4 parts in 10 millions of the uranium element. Most of the radium at present in use comes from Bohemia, though other low grade uranium deposits occur in Saxony, Russia, North America and Australia. Pitchblende which occurs in Cornwall, and large deposits of which are found at the mouth of the old tin workings, contains radium bromide. Two companies, the British Radium Corporation, Limited, and the Sooieta Indnstrielle de Radium, are working these deposits and it is stated that the deposit is a guarantee of an assured supply of radium in large quantity. To obtain radium from pitchblende is a matter of months perhaps of a year. The ore has to be crushed, fused, washed and dissolved. Then the result has to undergo many processes of crystallization before radium chloride is produced, from which the bromide is afterwards prepared. Radium is at present £750,000 per ounce, about £3O per milligramme, or about £1350 a grain. The radium bromide is enclosed in tubes and is applied to the tumour for varying periods of a few hours at a time.

IN the London Times of January Bth. Dr. Lazarus Barlow, director of the Cancer Research Laboratories at the Middlesex Hospital, gives authority for the publication of the following statistics as to the treatment of cancer. From June to September, 1913, he is reported to have said that 34 inoperable cases, such as the cancer department of the hospital only admits, were.! received, and that alljdied, a mortality of 100 per cent. During the corresponding period in 1913, on the other hand, 68 oases were admitted and that of these 36 died and 33 wera discharged from the hospital in a favourable conditiou au unprecedented event. It was added that in one or two cases only had a recurrence taken place, and it was hoped that with a fuller knowledge of the action of radium recurrences would be prevented. Dr, Lazarus Barlow is reported further to have said that it

was possible that in some oases a sufficiently powerful dose of the remedy had not been used, and that a few cells had beea left untouched from which the recurrence had started. He also said that while time was required to substantiate the remarkable results achieved, that there could no longer be any doubt as to the immediate effect of radium on cancers and tumours.

THAT Dr. Barlow’s view is too sanguine seems to have been shown by a communication to the “Times” a few days later. The members of the surgical staff of the Middlesex Hospital published a letter stating that tha report published on the Bth had been made without any communication with those responsible for the treatment of the patients, and that it did not correspond with their experience. They gave the following statement, founded on the returns of the Registrar of the faos pital. “During the year of 1913, 319 patients were under treatment in the 90 beds of the special cancer wards of the Middlesex Hospital. Of these 167 patients died, 67 were discharged at their own request, and 85 remained in the hospital at the end of the year. During the year 1913, 361 patients were under treatment; 198 died, 75 were discharged at their own request, and 88 remained at the end of the year ” It is added: “The results hitherto attained by the use of radium in the treatment of patients suffering from cancer, although in some cases most and in many cases hopeful, are not such as to justify the statement that in radium we have a care fjr can oer. ”