View report page

55
always progressing to cancer itself. One of these, abestosis,
is caused by breathing in the dust from asbestos and occurs
in asbestos workers. Needless to say, asbestos workers are
now subjected to rigorous routine medical inspections to
exclude disease of the lung whilst they are engaged in this
type of work. Finally, the boys were shown X-Rays of cancer
of the lung occurring in cigarette smokers and they, therefore,
accepted this as one of the many dust diseases.
Having outlined the radiology of the dust diseases and discussed
the environmental aspects, they were then shown slides
of the different types of lung cancer. Not all types of lung
cancer are due to cigaratte smoking and this explaing why some
people, who are non-smokers, occasionally develop the disease.
Graphs, demonstrating the increase in cancer of the lung,
were discussed, and it is interesting to note that, during the
study, deaths from lung cancer in cigarette smokers, continued
to rise by 1,000 a year and this mortality has continued up to
the present day. The boys were interested in treatment of
cancer of the lung and the surgical, radiotherapeutic and
hormonal aspects of treatment were discussed. The question
naturally arose as to what the prognosis of this disease was
and, generally speaking, the boys were told that there was an
average expectation of life of only five years. Of course, this
expectation of life depends upon the type of cancer and, also,
the stage at which it is initially diagnosed but, rather than
go deeply into the prognosis, they were given, what I consider
to be, a very fair figure of five years expectation of life. The
above is a summary of the general approach to the boys of this
Survey, and it was only in the last two years that cigarette
smoking and cancer were concentrated upon. Questionnaires,
as printed on the following page, were given to both Groups
before the Survey began.