Cancer Reports

For the first time since World War II, Soviet medical scientists last week joined their Western colleagues in discussing the common fight against cancer. At the sixth International Cancer Congress in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1,000 cancer researchers from 46 other nations listened attentively as Professor Alexander Savittski of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Science reported that 1) in the Soviet Union, "65% of malignant tumors have been cured"; 2) preventive examinations of the entire population over 35 years of age have resulted in "total elimination" of breast and uterine cancer in certain areas.

Western scientists found the undocumented Russian claims as hard to accept as Russia's love of peace on earth. Nor did they cotton to the basic Soviet contentions that cancer cells are made up of special "proteins" not present in normal cells and that a tumor is merely a local "manifestation" of a generalized illness depending primarily on the condition of the central nervous system. Scoffed one observer: "A lovely projection of the Soviet state."

Not Just Cigarettes. Liveliest threshing ground for the researchers' ideas was a symposium on cancer control. Conceding that there is a connection between cigarette smoking and cancer, the panel nevertheless put the spotlight on other possible causes--widely used food dyes and additives. Three food dyes have already been generally banned in the West: "Butter yellow" (used for butter and olive oil), "light green SF" (for green peas), and thiourea (used to prevent oranges from spoiling). Last year the U.S. Food and Drug Administration discovered that three of 18 approved synthetic dyes had caused cancer in animals; 31,000 lbs. of the dangerous dyes had already been consumed by the U.S. public. Warned Britain's Eric Boyland: "All synthetic food dyes are suspect, and should be investigated before they are used."

More dangerous than smoking are the many particles (mostly tars) breathed in by industrialized Western man, declared Dr. Wilhelm Hueper of the U.S. National Cancer Institute. Factory soot, arsenical dust, engine-exhaust fumes all contain such dangerous particles. In one N.C.I. survey of ten U.S. cities, tars were filtered out of the air, and even in tiny doses (.05 gram) they were found to cause skin cancer in laboratory mice.

New Kind of H-Bomb. Of the many new experimental treatments for cancer described at the congress, the most promising was a "desexed" hormone used by Urologist Charles B. Huggins of the University of Chicago. He reported that he had stripped the hydrogen atom from the sex-hormone molecule, thus ridding it of the power to masculinize or feminize, then administered it to women with advanced breast cancer. The sexless hormones, Huggins hopes, can block the normal female hormones that stimulate breast cancer.

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