RESEARCH AND HEALTH

Wairarapa Age, 4 February 1927, Page 5

RESEARCH AND HEALTH

AUSTRALASIAN MEDICAL CONFERENCE. DR. BARNETT’S PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. CALL TO COMMUNITY SERVICE. DUNEDIN, February 3. The Australasian Medical Conferenco was officially opened to-night. Dr. J. E. Barnett, after he had been installed in the office of president by the retiring president (Sir George Syme), delivered his inaugural address. Community service in the domain of the incidence of disease, he said, had been rightly placed in the forefront of the recommendations of the General Medical Council of the British Medical Association. At this and every B.M.A. Conference public health questions would be given the greatest prominence. They anticipated that their discussions on goitre and cysts would result in a very decided lessening in the frequency of these troublesome and yet largely preventable maladies. They would endeavour to stimulate and correlate cancer research in the various Australian and New Zealand centres. Although far more cases of cancer were cured now by operative and radiological means than in former years, chiefly because the patients were learning the wisdom of seeking treatment when the disease was in its early stage, yet owing to the increasing prevalence of this mysterious malady, the total death rate from cancer kept mounting higher and higher. The cancer problem was still with them, but ever nearing solution as a result of extensive labour in a hundred fields. He took this opportunity of congratulating Sydney University on the generous response of the people of New South Wales to its appeal for a Cancer Cam* paign Fund with a sum of well over £lOO,OOO. A splendid plan of research could be instituted and he only hoped that -other scientific centres in Australia and New Zealand, including Dunedin, might have the same good ■ fortune. Cancer was one only of many devastating diseases that called for extensive study. The governments in every civilised country now regarded it as their bounden duty to encourage research that had for its object the betterment of the public health. The Royal Commission on Health for Australia, so ably presided over by Sir George Syme, had recently reported the conclusions of one of the most valuable investigations into public health matters that had ever been made and one of the recommendations, and a very significant one, was that a Health Research Council should be established and provided with an endowment of £30,000 per annum. They would at their meetings give detailed attention ro the important subjects of maternal end infantile mortality, tuberculosis, and certain tropical diseases of great public concern in Northern Australia and the Pacific Islands, to the question concerning diet in health and sickness and to many other matters of special interest from the preventive medicine point of view.—(P.A.).