ROWING OUT

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 176, 5 November 1941, Page 3

ROWING OUT

ESCAPING NORWEGIANS

Norwegian patriots crossing the North Sea in rowing boats to light for their country's freedom have helped British scientists to make important experiments in X-ray photograph}'. London radiologists (in the llford Radiographic Technical and Demonstration Department) have been developing what might be called mass miniature radiograph}'; that is, the taking of X-ray photographs with a miniature camera so that large numbers of people can be examined for tuberculosis and heart disease quickly and economically. The Norwegians took part in these experiments because their London headquarters welcomed the chance fo find out their state of health. Some of them crossed to Britain after the raid on the Lofoten Islands: others, acting on their own initiative, descended to the fjords under cover of darkness and pushed off in ti-nv craft, smaller even that those in which their Viking ancestors once crossed the North Sea. Between lifty and sixty men who had got to Dakar, in French West Africa, came on from there. A feature of their X-ray photographs is tlie abnormal development of the chest muscles, resulting from long hours at the oars of their small boats. Mass miniature radiography, which, is used extensively in the South African diamond mines, is of great value at the present time, when Service recruits, war factory workers and users of air-raid shelters (who might have pulmonary lesions which would be missed in the ordinary clinical examination) can be X-rayed at the rate of :iOO nn hour. Several thousand people are dealt with in a day or so, whereas with ordinary radiography this would take weeks, even if it could be organised at all. Moreover, the tiny negative used ccstp only against the 2s 8d of the usual l.lin by 12in film. j