CANCER CONFERENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 January 1939, Page 5

CANCER CONFERENCE

ARRIVAL OF AUSTRALIAN DELEGATES PROGRESS OF RESEARCH. SOME ENCOURAGING FEATURES. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. Interesting comments on the cancer campaign in Australia were made in an interview by Dr Cumpston, Direc-tor-General of Public Health in Australia, who arrived by the Awatea to attend the cancer conference opening in Wellington on February 14. Dr Cumpston is to spend the intervening period in visiting Rotorua and the South Island. He is accompanied by his wife. Hhe will be joined at the conference by two of his officers, Drs Holmes and Eddy. He is interested in the work of medical schools and will visit that at Dunedin.

Dr Cumpston said some twenty-one leading Australian workers in the field of cancer would attend the conference in Wellington. He observed that, with the Central Laboratory at Melbourne University, there was a branch of his department with three physicists working full time standardising radium and X ray work and also doing research work in the technical aspects of the use of both. Facilities wore available at the big hospitals in the capital cities and they had also endeavoured to establish sub-centres in some of the principal country towns. There was in most of them an organisation on the lines of the British Empire Cancer Campaign, which assists the work considerably, and also they were now aiming to make available to every person throughout the Commonwealth the most modern facilities for the treat- - menl of cancer. The results had been most encouraging and Dr Holmes would be presenting a review of the situation to the conference. A detailed analysis of results had shown, as was generally recognised, that in proportion as they could secure patients in the early stages of cancer, so the results became more encouraging. They had a definite improvement each year in the figures of recovery.