CANCER RESEARCH.

Hokitika Guardian, 21 April 1923, Page 1

CANCER RESEARCH.

AN EXPERT’S OPINION. WELLINGTON, April 18 Dr Hugh Campbell Ross, the wellknown cancer specialist, has come on a visit to New Zealand. He was director of the research section at the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine in London, and is a brother of Sir Ronald Ross, the eminent head of Die Liverpool School of Tropical .Medicine, who has made a world-wide name in connexion with the prevention of malaria by getting rid of the mov quito, especially in the Panama C'anal

*'ol>e. Dr 11 iitili Husk landed at Piicairi Island on the voyage nut. and oxmnin ed at) per (cm of the islanders. I 1 ’run this examination, and from careful on f|uiries made on the spot, he says tlicrt can 1.0 no doubt that cancer does not exi.-t in the island, and never exi.stoti there. Since tl.e landing of tin .Mutineers of the Bounty in 17*0, records have been kept of all the deaths, which were mostly due to old age 01 accident. Not a single ease of eaneer. or even a suspicion of one, lias been heard of at Pitcairn, It was, he said, also established that the Esquimaux were Irce from cancer. Cancer, lie says, is not due to diet, and the fact that these two people, the Esquimaux and Pitcairnians, never get it, and havo diametrically opposed types of food, proves that cancer cannot lie climatic in origin. The observation' al'O slum that cancer is not hereditary. Both the Esquimaux and Pitcairnians are descended from cancerous stock. The former are descended trom the Chinese. The latter are halt English and half Tahitian ; yet neither .nets cancer. I here remains one explanation—isolation. Both Esquimaux and Pitcairn Islanders always have been more or less isolated. They do not mix with others. In other words it means that cancer is ail infective disease. It is, at least in part, caused by a germ or some agent derived from without the body which has to he imported into a puiimninii v lie lore the disease can occur. I >1- iio.'.-; l hereforo put in ;i flea for the notification of (lie disease, and its isolation where it is humanlv possible.