The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1929 WOMEN MUST FIGHT CANCER

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 777, 25 September 1929, Page 8

The Sun 42 WYNDHAM STREET, AUCKLAND WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1929 WOMEN MUST FIGHT CANCER

/CANCER is now a monstrous scourge on the white races that boast loudest about wisdom and the forward march of medical science. On the other side of the racial shield ther disease touehes lightly or does not touch at all coloured and “savage” peoples. Indeed, it is restrained truth to say that cancer has become almost as terrible in havoc on life as a year of modern warfare among a score of advanced nations. The aggregate cancer mortality in the English-speaking countries alone anhually equals the total population of Greater Auckland. Twenty-two countries in particular throughout the highly civilised world are ravaged by this insidious disease. The least of these—Spain—has a cancer mortality rate of fractionally more than six per 10,000 of population; the greatest or worst— Denmark—is as high as nearly 14 persons in the same proportionate total. New Zealand stands eleventh in the list of countries most seriously afflicted. In proportion to population this country is worse than the United States which annually inters 120.000 cancer victims. Great Britain suffers more than 53,000 deaths a year from the same disease. Hence the necessity of a serious crusade in New Zealand against a ruthless menace in a country still in the making—a land gifted lavishly with many of the most beautiful and most bracing natural delights in the world. As the largest centre of population in the Dominion, Auckland must take the lead in providing effective ways and means for combating a scourge, or accept classification by outside observers as a frivolous and callous community. Since this city is neither frivolous nor callous at heart, it must yield a generous portion of its wealth for the creation and adequate equipment of a radium clinic. This will cost a large sum of money, yet really a trivial amount compared with the ready expenditure on gambling and other wasteful pleasure and excitement. In other countries, most notably in France, the Government provides radium for the curative treatment of cancer as an economic gain to the nation. France,'’however, has statesmen. Here, administrators and politicians are so busy wrangling over party interests and trivialities that they have not noticed how far behind they lag in initiative and progress. Great Britain is only a little quicker, but is quickening its pace. Sweden, France and Bavaria are the world’s leaders against the white man’s worst scourge. And their weapon of warfare on cancer is not the surgeon’s knife; it is radium. No one has yet claimed with complete confidence that radiation from the highest pitched rays of radium is a certain cure tor cancer. There is, however, a much less assertive claim as to the value of the mutilative knife which, as frankly admitted by many medical experts abroad, has an appalling record. In spite of a long monopoly in its use on cancerous growths, the deathrate has increased. Today, in the Old World, radium supersedes the surgeon’s implement. And if radium should fail to cure, it rarely ever kills. That is not the impertinent opinion of laymen; it is the considered verdict of the world’s best radiologists. But it may he mentioned, incidentally, that Dr. Janet Lane Claypon, one of the most.distinguished medical women in Great Britain, investigated eighty thousand records of cancer in females and found that radiation was superior to the knife. Moreover, “the use of radiation has practically no mortality, whereas the surgical operation which yields results most nearly comparable to those of radiation has itself a mortality of about one ease in three. Ihen it has been admitted that it required the cumulative effect of thirty thousand deaths in surgically-treated cases of cancer within a few years to convince many members of the medical profession and several great hospitals that the time had come to break what has been called (perhaps much too harshly) “a futile monopoly.” Women should take a persuasive part in the Empire movement for the raising of funds for'the purchase of radium with which to wage a burning war on cancer. They suffer from the disease even more than men. And more frequently their suffering is accessible to the radium needles. It was a woman, Madame Curie, who discovered radium in 1898. Let the women of Auckland demand its use for the alleviation and cure of the deadliest scourge upon the mothers of the future generation. THE NEW SPIRIT OF THE RAILWAYS IT was a ppropriate that business men ill a city whose goodwill toward the railways is vital to their success should yesterday be given an impression of the enterprising and businesslike manner in which the new railway management is setting out to capture wider patronage and, what is more important, to keep it. The keynote of the new policy is efficiency, and both the Westfield deviation and the new Otahuhu workshops represent a striving toward that end. In the old days of the system the various repair shops were scattered all over both Islands. The centralisation considered requisite in modern industry had no place in the selieme. Today that old, haphazard arrangement is replaced by major establishments which eadh have a cardinal purpose. The political attack which was recently launched against this principle had obviously no basis in common sense or technical knowledge. The class of work the new shops pan turn out was demonstrated to the visitors yesterday by the trim, comfortable and up-to-date appearance of the rolling stock designed and built for the new Rotorua expresses. These trains will become invested with a character of their own. They may become the local countei-part of the famous “Blue Train” of the Riviera, and the “Sunshine Limited” of England. The appointments of those trains convey a hint of luxury and stimulate the urge to travel in them along a pathway of pleasure. Their names are the symbol of service, the expression of efficiency in transport. So in New Zealand much may be done by divesting the passenger services of their former drabness. Coupled with the improvement of Main Trunk cars, the new Rotorua trains represent the fifrst effort to give glamour to the railway system. With improvement of services goes the need for publicity, and there are more ways than one of gaining it. Mr. H. H. Stirling is astutely alive to this possibility. The invitation tendered to the business men of Auckland for yesterday’s outing was a publicity and goodwill gesture on a handsome scale. It demonstrated to men whose support is worth having that there is a new and virile spirit behind the national organisation of the railways. It may be years before this driving force can achieve the desired results, but the whole trend of its policy is to build for a future years, not merely months, ahead. The spacious mills at Otahuhu may seem over-elaborate for 1929, but at least they will not be obsolete or overcrowded in 20 years, and in 1939, and 1949, they will go on contributing toward the efficiency of a service now directed with a vigour that is already upsetting old traditions and may ultimately lift the railways to a new level in public regard.