NORWEGIAN PATRIOTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 December 1941, Page 6

NORWEGIAN PATRIOTS

HELP GIVEN TO BRITISH SCIENTISTS. DEVELOPMENT OF- X-RAY EXPERIMENTS. Norwegian patriots crossing the North Sea in rowing boats to fight for their country’s freedom have helped British scientists to make important experiments in X-ray photography. London radiologists (in the Ilford Radiographic Technical and Demonstration Department) have been developing what might be called mass miniature radiography; that is, the taking of X-ray photographs with a miniature camera so that large numbers of people can be examined for tuberculosis and heart disease quickly and economically. The Norwegians took part in these experiments because their London headquarters welcomed the chance to find out their state of health. Some of them cressed to Britain after the raid on the Lofoten Islands. Others, acting on their own initiative, descended to the fiords under cover of darkness and pushed off in. tiny craft, smaller even than those in which their Viking ancestors once crossed the North Sea. Between fifty and sixty men who had got to Dakar, in French West Africa, came on from there. A feature of their X-ray photographs is the abnormal development of the chest muscles, resulting from long hours at the oars of their small boats. Mass miniature radiography, which is used extensively in the South African diamond mines, is of great value at the present time, when Service recruits, war factory workers and users of air-raid shelters (who might have pulmonary lesions which would be missed in the ordinary clinical examination) can be X-rayed at the rate of 300 an hour. Several thousand people are dealt with in a day or so, whereas with ordinary radiography this would take weeks, even if it could be organised at all. Moreover, the tiny negative used costs only lid, against the 2s 8d cf the usual 15in by 12in film,