Dry July 2024: Whitianga doctor takes on challenge for six family members who died of cancer

Dr Kevin Pringle, a retired paediatric surgeon and medical researcher, lives in Whitianga.

At 77 years of age, Whitianga resident Dr Kevin Pringle is taking on his second Dry July challenge to raise funds for a campaign close to his heart.

Dry July is a nationwide campaign that challenges people to go alcohol-free for a month to raise funds for Kiwis affected by cancer.

Pringle, a retired paediatric surgeon and medical researcher, knows the disease all too well as he has lost six family members to cancer.

Talking to the Hauraki-Coromandel Post, Pringle said he was participating in honour of his wife Carol, who died from leukaemia in 2022, his parents and four brothers.

“It is not a pretty story,” he said.

Pringle said he was the only sibling who had not been diagnosed with cancer.

His oldest brother Peter died in 1983, aged 43, from colon cancer; father George, 81, died in 1991 from prostate cancer; mother Valerie, 87, died in 2005 from colon cancer; brother Alan, 54, died in 2008 from lung cancer; and brother Dennis, 76, died in 2020 from lung cancer.

His only surviving brother, Ian, 82, has been diagnosed with bladder cancer, which is in remission.

Pringle said it was his late wife who inspired him to participate in Dry July for the first time in 2023. After hearing of another Whitianga resident who had undertaken the challenge, it was an obvious choice for Pringle to participate.

Last year, he raised more than $1000.

Doctor Kevin Pringle has lost his parents, three brothers and his wife Carol to cancer.

Pringle said he had never been an excessive drinker and stopped altogether for 10 years in the late 1960s and 1970s. He enjoys a beer at weekends or if he is out for dinner.

“It is actually fine staying off the booze for a month, maybe I should do it longer,” he joked.

“The evidence is there; there is no safe consumption of alcohol – reduction is good for you.”

He had some frustrations with the progress of cancer research and had hoped there would be better cures, treatments and more trials during his lifetime.

“My beef with adult cancer, especially in New Zealand, is the access to controlled trials is abysmal,” he said.

“There is no dedicated funding for research and not a lot of desire.”

He always advised cancer patients to try to get themselves into controlled trials.

“The results of trials are better than the results of no trials.

“When Carol was diagnosed, I went looking – there wasn’t a single trial in New Zealand she would have been eligible for.”

Pringle studied in Otago and worked in the United States for a decade before returning to New Zealand, where he was based in Wellington until his retirement in 2015.

On average, every 22 minutes, another New Zealander receives life-changing news that they have cancer.

The funds raised during Dry July are going to the charities Look Good Feel Better, Prostate Cancer Foundation New Zealand and PINC & STEEL Cancer Rehabilitation Foundation.