WE MUST HAVE RADIUM

Taranaki Daily News, 8 October 1928, Page 11

WE MUST HAVE RADIUM

SIR E. RUTHERFORD'S SEARCH. DEMAND OF WOMEN DOCTORS. Dr. C. W. Saleeby, F.R.S.E., writes in the London Daily Mail: — Beyonff all dispute if the Cancer Conference had a hero that hero was radium. Despised and decried for years, radium now definitely undertakes to relieve the victim of cancer of the tongue or cancer of the womb from the ghastly ministrations of the surgeons, and can safely achieve, results vastly superior to their appallingly dangerous best. Let us thank Heaven for that. Nor should we forget that women doctors have done magnificent service, especially to their own sex, in helping to establish radium, though no one would guess from the conference proceedings what the women’s share had been. Wherever cancer is treated there radium should be available. The day before the conference I published tho prediction that the many surgeons who then decried radium would not decry it a week later, nor ever again. The discussions were final and constitute the one positive achievement of a lamentably disappointing week. Radium is very dear and very scarce. It is only available as yet for a tiny proportion of the vast host who need, it. Medical and other women have lately asked for money for radium and have had a miserably poor response. So long as we continue to ignore the prevention of cancer we must have radium.

On very high authority I learn that the principal source of radium at present is the Belgian Congo. Our own immediately adjoining territory might yield radium. Sir Ernest Rutherford, F.R.S., the world-famous student of radio-activity, is undertaking the chairmanship of a committee, under the auspices of the Ministry of Health, which will, inter alia, make geological and chemical inquiries in the hope of obtaining British Empire radium, so to say, for no less a purpose than the cure of large numbers of cases of cancer to whom radium offers by far the best, if not the only, chance of life.

We must have radium. Either through a national fund or an allocation made by the Exchequer, as is the case with munitions in an ordinary transient war. That would be a long business, I fear, with vested interests in the way. If the conference had been conducted on tho usual lines which lead to success its final meeting would have, discussed this question, which would not have been left to be dealt with by any single pen, or even by any single newspaper. But, .somehow . or other, we giw have radium.