Cancer Scourge.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XLIX, Issue 149, 7 September 1928, Page 2 (Supplement)

Cancer Scourge.

SOME APPALINQ FIGURES.

Health Society’s Propaganda

JT HAS BEEN said that every religion must have its hell, from which its

devotees flee in seeking salvation. Civilisation has made its own hell, in the self-inflicted scourge of cancer, that horrible and deadly disease which is fast approaching the first place in the catalogue of causes of mortality in civilised communities.

The latest figures available for this country—l926—show that one person in every eight living to-day is foredoomed to die of cancer. While the general deathrato is steadily declining, and toll from cancer is rapidly rising. Between 1911 and 1926 the total annual mortality from all causes, in England and Wales, declined from 527,810 to 453,804, while for the same period the deaths from cancer increased from 35,902 to 53,220 — a rise of fully 50 per cent.

In the short space of fifteen years the annual death-rate from cancer has been relatively doubled. While the healthier housing and living conditions of the people are fast reducing the tuberculosis mortality towards the point of extinction, the cancer death-rate of this country has multiplied eight times in less than a century, being 173 per million in 183842 and 1,362 in 1926. Worse still, the increase is at a far greater rate in recent years than in the last century, and it has now become positively alarming. The greatest increase has taken place in the gastro intestinal tract.

Contrast this appalling situation and prospect for civilised man with the almost absolute freedom of the native, living under primitive conditions, from this and other diseases which afflict the white man. A legion of scientists and medical men could be cited to show that, as long as the native lives in the state to which his predecessors have been accustomed for thousands of years, he is strong, vigorous and robust. While exposed to infections incidental to the climate and surroundings in which he exists, he is quite free from the main disabilities, degenerations and diseases which arc so terribly prevalent in those who eat the food and pursue the habits of civilised life.

In America there have been for many years great research institutions established especially for the purpose of finding some cure for concer, which is steadily exacting an increasing toll on the lives of all white communities, to say nothing of the misery and anxiety involved in operations for its cure or for the alleviation of the suffering it entails. -In the United States millions of pounds have been spent on these institutions, in providing magnificent buildings, elaborate and costly instruments for research, and salaries for the experts and others employed in investigations. Innumerable animals have been utilised in experiments attempting to throw some light on cancer. With all this expenditure of money, intellect and time no real benefit has been obtained by those suffering from cancer, and nothing has been suggested to prevent its development or spread in the community. The authorities in medical charge of the people, being disappointed with the absence of any useful output from these institutions, camfe to the conclusion that the only help they could afford the people was to impress on them the importance of the early recognition of the disease, since it was obvious that it was only in its initial stage that surgery offered any opportunity of eradicating it. Consequently, it was decided to broadcast as widely as possible the importance of (examining, as frequently as might be practicable, any part of the body liable to become cancerous. Though this advice presents obvious advantages, it has made the lives of an immeasurable number of people miserable. They have become obsessed with the danger of cancer, and so introspective as to make the latter half of life almost intolerable.

The principle underlying the propaganda of the New Health Society, in relation to this disease, is that the cancer organism never affects a healthy organ. It can only find a medium in which it can thrive in an organ which has become degenerated by a prolonged process of poisoning by blood loaded with toxic materials absorbed over a period of years from a foul intestine. If the individual is to avoid such a process of degeneration of his organs, it is necessary to k'eep the gastro-intestinal tract in a healthy condition. We know that the native does so by diet, and if we can effect the same ends by modifying our food and habitswe shall eliminate cancer and the innumerable other diseases which are necessarily associated with a contaminated food supply. Let us employ what simple truths we know, and do our utmost to teach the people to be healthy, remembering always that cancer never affects a healthy organ.