NOT REPRESENTED

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 414, 24 July 1928, Page 8

NOT REPRESENTED

IT is a pity that New Zealand had no official representative at the Empire Cancer Conference in London. We have had experts, both great and small, running to and fro about the world on all sorts of errands, not all of them specially urgent; but we sent nobody to a conference at which the world’s scientific strength was being mustered against a'terrible disease. It is not that there was nobody to send; it is not that New Zealand is so happily immune as to need no assistance. The last Official Year Book records that “cancer is annually responsible for more deaths in New Zealand than can be assigned to any cause other than organic disease of the heart,” and it notes that cancer’s increasing prevalence is causing “no little concern in the Dominion.” To express the incidence of the disease in bald figures it may be stated that one death in nine is due to cancer. Research so far has made no decisive advance. False hopes have more than once been raised. But it is impossible not to believe that inquiries, so systematic and so many-sided, conducted by the finest scientific intelligence in the medical profession will ultimately bring victory. Laboratory experiment, the study of dietetics, clinical observation, detailed statistical records—from any of these, or from all of them together, certainty will sooner or later be derived. The Cancer Conference permitted the collation of the results of independent inquiry. The synthesis which means triumph may be its reward. But New Zealand was there neither to learn nor to add its own knowledge to the pool.