OIL-ENGINE FUMES DO NOT CAUSE LUNG CANCER
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oil-engine fumes are in any way connected with the disease. Indeed, their investigations suggest that cigarette smoking is far more likely to contribute to it.
Load Transfers on Roads to be Stopped?
THE standing joint committee of the 28 London borough councils are considering a suggestion that they should seek new powers to stop the "nuisance caused by the transfer of loads between vehicles parked on the public highways outside hauliers' premises, and the conduct of other business on the public highway.
The committee have asked the councils to notify them of the extent to which the nuisance is prevalent in their boroughs, and for suggestions for steps which could be taken to mitigate it, R.O.S.Co.'s FIRST MEETING
THE first meeting of the Road Operators' Safety Council, the new body set up earlier in the month by the Conference of Omnibus Companies, Municipal Passenger Transport Association, Passenger Vehicle Operators Association and Transport and General Workers' Union to administer the industry's own safe-driving competition, took place yesterday.
British Road Services said on Wednesday that they had not been invited to take part in the new competition.
The London Transport Executive are believed to be considering withdrawing from the safe-driving competition sponsored by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, but they are to remain in the scheme for 1955.
150 FINES ON HAULIERS
FINES totalling £150. with £15 15s. costs, were imposed upon Robert Earl and Sons (Transport), Ltd., Sheffield, at Sheffield last week, for offences concerning drivers' hours and records. Fourteen drivers were fined an aggregate of £39.
Mr. E. Wurzal, prosecuting, said that he regulations governing hours and records were "more vital than ever today."
MONO-CONTROL FOR LEEDS
QOME of Leeds Corporation's trams
are to be replaced by A.E.C. buses with mono-control transmission. The first of the new buses is to be handed over next Tuesday.
Aid. J. Rafferty, chairman Of the traniport committee, who has only one leg, will demonstrate the ease with which the bus can be driven by piloting it over a special route.
A22 They are Dr. Richard Doll and Prof. Bradford Hill, and I have been allowed to read a private report on their work.
It stated that their investigations, and many similar inquiries in other countries, had demonstrated that there %/as a close relationship between the number of cigarettes smoked in a day and liability to lung cancer. As Stocks and others had shown, people who lived in urban areas were also more susceptible to the disease, although the relationship to urban dwelling did not appear to be as close as that to cigarette sinoking.
The proportion of cancer patients who drove vehicles or worked on the roads or in garages was no greater than that of persons in other occupations. Consequently, there was a strong suggestion that association with motor vehicles carried no specific risk of lung cancer.
Observations Confirmed Observations by these two investigators agree with those of other workers. including Wynder and Graham in the United States, who also failed to find among lung-cancer patients an excessively high proportion of men engaged in transport.
In the absence of any direct evidence to suggest that persons who, by reason of their occupation, are specifically exposed to oil-engine and other motor fumes, stiffer undue liability to the disease, it was thought to be unreasonable to attribute the high rate of mortality from lung cancer in towns to pollution of the air with exhaust vapours.
On more general grounds, the investigators were fairly confident that the recent great increase in the number of deaths from lung cancer had not been caused by oil-engine fumes. lung cancer had spread almost contemporaneously with the expansion in the use of oil engines, if indeed it did not precede it.
From what was known of industrial cancers in man, cancer would not be expected to be induced by oil-engine fumes until perhaps 20 or more years after exposure to them.
B.M.M.O. OPEN THIRD HOSTEL
IVING accommodation for _another 30 men employed by the Birmingham and Midland Motor Omnibus Co-, Ltd., has been provided in a hostel opened recently at Dudley. The company have two other staff hostels, each accommodating 30 employees, one of which is at Sutton Coldfield and the other at Leamington Spa.