THE CANCER SCOURGE.

Waikato Times, Volume 121, Issue 20246, 15 July 1937, Page 7

THE CANCER SCOURGE.

“THOUSANDS BEING CURED.” t# STATEMENT BY MINISTER. How the war against cancer is succeeding was strikingly emphasised by Sir Kingsley Wood, the British Minister of Health, presiding the other night at the dinner given by lI.M. Government to the International Union Against Cancer. He said— Although the cure of cancer had not been discovered, nevertheless, if the disease was caught in its early stages, under treatment by surgery, by deep X-rays, or by radium, it had shown a high recovery rate. It was simply untrue, as too many people thought, that diagnosis of cancer was necessarily a death sentence. In Great Britain, for instance, it was true that over 60,000 people died every year from cancer. When, however, the increased longevity of the population and the more accurate diagnosis of the disease was taken into account it was probably fallacious to assume that these figures connoted a greater prevalence of whatever factors were concerned in its causation. The position generally, so far as treatment was concerned, was more hopeful than at any time, and thousands of people were being cured today. This was a great thing and a fact which could not be too widely known, for perhaps an even more deadly enemy than cancer was the nameless fear which caused a man or woman to destroy his or her hope of life by postponing a visit to the doctor until it was already too late.