War Against Cancer

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 409, 18 July 1928, Page 9

War Against Cancer

EXPERTS MEET IN LONDON

Gye’s Claims Destroyed

(United P.A.—Bv Telegraph — Copyright) (Australian and N.Z. Press Association.) (United Service) Received 10 a.in. LONDON, Tuesday. THE Empire Cancer Conference, at which Sir John Bland Sutton is presiding, is attracting wide interest. The programme includes 50 papers, mostly British, French and American. There are none from New Zealanders.

To-day’s papers suggested that radiotherapy was probably most successful in the early stages.

Dr. Malcolm Donaldson, of the London Hospital, offered the opinion that insurance companies were in the position to afford most useful co-operation, by offering special terms to clients who were medically examined every six months, thereby ensuring the earliest diagnosis. Sir Gilbert Barling, of Birmingham University, suggested tobacco smoking as a possible explanation of the preponderance of certain types of cancer in males, compared with females. Professor Ewing, of New York, said coal-tar products produce cancer with greater certainty than any known irritant. Dr. Archibald Leitch, director of the

Research Institute of the Cancer Hospital, London, said the fact that cancer was largely a disease of the middleaged and the elderly must not be attributed to senility of the tissues. It had been demonstrated repeatedly that if young and old animals were subjected simultaneously to cancerinducing substances, tumour formations were simultaneous in both cases. Elderly people were more subject to cancer because their longer lives provided greater time for noxious agents to operate. Critical work in various parts of the world had destroyed the claims of Gye and Barnard to have discovered a general cancer parasite. Dr. J. B. Murphy, of the Rockefeller Institute, contended that no such parasite existed, and claimed to have found a malignant agent which produced a malignant growth in fowls.