Chemical Aspects of Industrial Skin Cancer Caused by Pitch and Tar

Abstract

From the point of view of treatment, pitch warts and pitch and tar cancer constitute a very satisfactory group of tumours. However much we may deprecate the fact that these workers are exposed to carcinogenic agents and run the risk of developing cancer as a result of their work, they do show what can be done when a group of people are trained to report to their doctors at the earliest suspicion of trouble, when medical inspection is available, and when the doctors concerned have the possibility of cancer always in mind. It is, of course, a very simplified example of a method of dealing with a cancer problem, but even if some may feel that the problem ought to be avoided altogether, at least we can say that it is one which is dealt with efficiently. The combination of education of the patients, vigilance of the industrial medical officers, and accessibility of the tumours produces a 100 per cent, cure rate. In the past these lesions were often treated by the insertion of radon seeds. The introduction to this country of short-distance low-voltage X-ray therapy, or “contact” therapy, in 1935, provided a simpler and more efficient form of radiotherapy, ideally suited to the treatment of small surface lesions which soon supplanted radon in this field of industrial skin cancer.