RESEARCH SHOWS CANCER IS CURABLE IN EARLY STAGES

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 75, 30 July 1948, Page 6

RESEARCH SHOWS CANCER IS CURABLE IN EARLY STAGES

(By Reece Smith, New Zealand Kemsley Empire Journalist) London, July 7. Cancer is a problem not likely to be solved in one, all-re-vealing discovery. The answer will come through the piecing together of thousands of small items, and the plotting of the trends they indicate. Already 300 cancer producing compounds are, known, and can be guarded against. This is an opinion given by Professor R. W'. Scarff, perhaps Britain’s leading cancer research authority, in an interview at Middlesex Hospital, London. Professor Scarff has two immediate and non-technical suggestions for curbing the cancer scourge. First, he says, it cannot be too widely published that cancer is curable. Caught early, cancer of the skin has been cured in 98 out of 100 cases; cancer of the womb in 79 out of 100. • •Second, he calls down a plague on quacks with their patent medicines fot curing or relieving cancer. A routine check by a general practitioner should reveal most kinds of cancer. Others may show in X-ray. Anyone suspecting cancer should report at once, implies Professor Scarff. Many times he has found great cancers which must have been evident years before they grew beyond hope. There has always been cancer in the world. Traces of it have been found on fossilised- ,pteradactyls. Professor Scarff would not say it was more or less prevalent today than ever it was.Research is now being concentrated on what it is that makes a health cell break-away from the community lif6 it is leading in the body, and, while continuing to thrive as a cell, to set up a rival organisation to disrupt that community life. Once it is discovered why the cell rebels, the rest of the research path may show clearly.