Anemia Related Quotes

When James Larrick and his colleagues studied the still relatively isolated Waorani Indians of Ecuador, they found no evidence of hypertension, heart disease, or cancer. No anemia or common cold. No internal parasites. No sign of previous exposure to polio, pneumonia, smallpox, chicken pox, typhus, typhoid, syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, or serum hepatitis.16 This is not as surprising as it may seem, given that almost all these diseases either originated in domesticated animals or depend upon high-density population for easy transmission. The deadliest infectious diseases and parasites that have plagued our species could not have spread until after the transition to agriculture.

The journalist Stewart Alsop was confined to one such ward at the NIH in 1973 for the treatment of a rare and unidentifiable blood cancer. Crossing its threshold, he encountered a sanitized version of hell. "Wandering about the NIH clinical center, in the corridors or in the elevator, one comes occasionally on a human monster, on a living nightmare, on a face or body hideously deformed," he wrote. Patients, even disguised in "civilian" clothes, could still be identified by the orange tinge that chemotherapy left on their skin, underneath which lurked the unique pallor of cancer-related anemia. The space was limbolike, with no simple means of egress-no exit. In the glass-paneled sanatorium where patients walked for leisure, Alsop recalled, the windows were covered in heavy wire mesh to prevent the men and women confined in the wards from jumping off the banisters and committing suicide.

Weeks earlier, we’d had our blood drawn during a med check, and the doctors discovered I carried the Sickle Cell Trait. I didn’t have the disease, Sickle Cell Anemia, but I had the trait, which was believed at the time to increase the risk of sudden, exercise-related death due to cardiac arrest. The Air Force didn’t want me dropping dead in the middle of an evolution and pulled me out of training on a medical.

Coincidence? Probably not. Pregnancy isn’t the only time folate is important, of course. A lack of folate is also directly linked to anemia, because folate helps to produce red blood cells.   THE SKIN, AS you’ve probably heard, is the largest organ of the human body. It’s an organ in every sense of the word, responsible for important functions related to the immune system, the nervous system, the circulatory system, and metabolism. The skin protects the body’s stores of folate, and it’s in the skin that a crucial step in the manufacturing of vitamin D takes place.