Holocaust survivors at greater risk for cancer, study finds
By joshuah at 7 November, 2009, 8:18 am
Watch the video first. An interesting bit of re-search from University of Haifa . What this 79 year old woman experienced during World War II was and is not unique in any way to the Jews. It sounds as though this woman’s family has a history of cancer, and that is nothing unique either. Visit any Dr’s office and fill out the family history section of the forms.
Anyway, plenty of other people suffered (and continue to suffer today) as a result of the mal-nutrition and stress and disease and death and all the other things associated with war. Yes, including Germans.
My mother-in-law has just as many traumatic memories from her own childhood: of clambering over the body parts of her neighbors that had just been blown to pieces, of being squeezed through basement windows to steal food because she was the only one who was small enough to fit through the window, etc, etc etc. Incidentally, many many children started smoking back then as a means to stave off hunger. It killed a lot of them.
So I repeat: What this 79 year old woman experienced during World War II was not unique in any way to the Jews.
And I have one question. Why is the “German” propaganda piece behind this woman written in English? Most certainly it would have been written in German.
The 12-year-old girl plucked cold, slimy potato peels out of the garbage containers in a village in eastern Poland. When those trash scraps became scarce, she ate clover.
Crumbs and decomposed food sickened Betty Potash Gold and her family members, causing diarrhea and bloody vomiting, as they hid from the Nazis.
Although Gold lived through extreme hunger, mental duress and near-death experiences during the Holocaust, she and other survivors face another peril decades after the war.
“Jewish survivors of World War II who were potentially exposed to the Holocaust were at a higher risk for cancer occurrence later on in life than those not exposed,” concluded a study published in the November issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Intense calorie deprivation, such as what Gold experienced, has long-term effects on survivors, said Dr. Micha Barchana, one of the study authors.
…
Although studies with rhesus monkeys and mice suggest that limiting calories conferred cancer-protecting benefits, this study showed the opposite effect. People subjected to the intense caloric deprivation, especially at an early age, had greater likelihood of cancer.
Source/Full Story: cnn.com
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