| Can
Cactus Heal?
Results in early testing at University of Arizona show promise in cancer prevention By
Mike Touzeau
The late, legendary Rod Serling once produced an episode for his television series, "The Twilight Zone," in which a stranger visits a small village in Mexico bringing a book as a gift to all the people. The residents kill him and burn the pages beyond recognition, declaring it an intrusion of evil in their midst. Only a trusting young boy named Pedro believes him. Turns out he was an alien visitor who wanted to present Earth's people with a cure for all forms of cancer as a gesture of friendship. Americans who discuss the dreaded disease in the coffee shops, at work, and in their living rooms, call it "The Big C" and virtually everyone who has experienced its devastation in their family lives firsthand can tell you how much they fear it, so much they don't even want to think about it. Only diseases of the heart claim more lives than cancer. It was estimated that, from 1980-1996, more than one in four Americans' deaths could be attributed in some way to the disease. A visitor of another sort, Dr. Changping Zou, M.D., Ph.D., though an American citizen and an associate professor in Gynecologic Oncology in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Arizona and a research scientist at the Arizona Cancer Center, comes to us originally from Beijing, China, where her father is a pediatric surgeon, her mother an anesthesiologist. Like
the Serling character, she reveals some pretty astounding results from
her work with chemopreventive agents in major cancer areas, especilly ovarian
and cervical.
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