Wood smoke contains hundreds of chemical compounds and some of them can harm people with heart or respiratory disease, babies, young children and pregnant women.

Pollutants in wood smoke can cause the eyes, nose and throat to burn with irritation, and cause headache and nausea in some people.

Walking in neighborhoods where fireplace smoke is heavy can cause irregular heart beat, chest pain and shortness of breath in susceptible people. The smoke can make asthma symptoms worse and cause higher rates of lung inflammation and pneumonia in young children .

Also, unless chimneys are cleaned seasonally, creosote, a combustible byproduct of wood burning, can lodge in the chimney and spark a fire.

Fireplaces aren’t efficient home heaters. Most homes aren’t perfectly insulated, so cold air seeps in under doors and through cracks, while hot air escapes up the chimney.

If flues are not properly installed and maintained, particles released during wood burning can escape into the home. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says several of the pollutants emitted by wood burning have demonstrated cancer-causing properties similar to cigarette smoke.

To reduce your risk of harm from using a wood-burning fireplace, follow these tips:

• Burn hardwoods like oak, mesquite and pecan instead of soft woods like cedar, fir or pine. The wood should be split and dried for at least six months.

• Use smaller pieces of wood. They burn more efficiently and are a better source of heat.

• Allow enough room inside the fireplace for air to circulate freely around the wood.

• Never burn plastics, painted wood, charcoal, printed pages in a fireplace. They will release toxic materials into the air.

• Check your chimney from the outside. If you see smoke, your fire is not burning hot enough. Give the fire more air, and then check again.

• Check before you light a fire to see if local air pollution levels are elevated. If they are, avoid using the fireplacee. Get pollution information at airinfonow.org or call Pima County’s Department of Environmental Quality air pollution hotline at (520) 882-4AIR or (520) 882-4247.

• Remember … If you can smell smoke, you are breathing smoke!

(L-R) Dr. Scott Sherman, Dr. Elihu Boroson and his wife, Sarah, with Boroson’s ‘Excalibur’ sculpture, which he donated to the University of Arizona College of Medicine in honor of Sherman, a Parkinson’s researcher. (Photo courtesy AHSC Biomedical Communications)

For some people it takes a lifetime to find their passion. Dr. Elihu Boroson, a veterinarian for 23 years, found his when he became a full-time artist in 1980. He and his wife, Sarah, a librarian, lived in Stamford, Conn. She became the breadwinner. “When I stopped working I became an artist and a chef,” quips Elihu. “When the breadwinner comes home, dinner has to be ready.”

Since then, Boroson has created sculptures, ceramics, paintings and even musical instruments, including a harpsichord and five guitars — many of which adorn the couple’s 1,400-square-foot home in Marana’s Sunflower community. Before the Borosons moved from Pomona, N.Y. to Tucson in 1997, to be near one of their four children, they sold more than half of Elihu’s artwork.

Two years later, Elihu was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Unable to handle heavy tools, he still paints. “Since having Parkinson’s I’ve ended up doing what I could do, not what I wanted to do,” Elihu, now 83, told the AJP at the couple’s home last month. From his wheelchair, he proudly led a tour of years of his artwork.

“Combining materials like wood and steel is one of my passions, materials that wouldn’t necessarily be put together,” says Elihu, noting that it would take him about a month to plan a large sculpture and another month to create it.

One of these pieces, “Excalibur” — a sculpture depicting the legendary sword in the stone — was installed and dedicated on Nov. 18 at the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine, in the lobby of the medical research building. The Borosons donated the sculpture, carved from a single piece of white marble that was quarried in Lee, Mass., in honor of Dr. Scott Sherman, a Parkinson’s researcher at the university.

The text on the plaque accompanying the sculpture refers to Sherman’s “efforts to increase the quality of life for Parkinson’s patients, and his ongoing work to understand the disease and find a cure.”

Sherman, who has been Elihu’s physician for the past decade, has also toured the Borosons’ home/personal art museum. Patients with Parkinson’s “are a very creative group of people,” says Sherman, also a UA associate professor of neurology. “It’s been fun over the years for them to share their art and music with me.”

Elihu has received “standard treatment with medication” for his Parkinson’s, says Sherman, adding that “Parkinson’s doesn’t go away. Artistic pursuits and exercise have a definite positive impact, whether it’s visual arts, writing or poetry.”

Sherman and his research team at the UA Parkinson’s Research Laboratory conduct pharmaceutical-based trials for patients just diagnosed with the illness, whom, he says, “we hope will have a slow progression.” Researchers “also do pre-clinical research. We just hired a stem cell specialist to look at how to treat Parkinson’s by taking stem cells from patients and turning them into brain cells.

“The public doesn’t realize,” explains Sherman, “that one of the difficulties studying Parkinson’s is we don’t have access to brain cells directly because only humans get [the disease]. The bottom line is we have to study human cells.”

Another clinical study at the UA research laboratory involves molecules that are “somewhat related to caffeine,” says Sherman. “People who drink a lot of coffee, or smoke cigarettes, have an inverse relationship to getting Parkinson’s. I’m not advocating that people with or without Parkinson’s drink more coffee or smoke cigarettes.”

There are other factors involved “in whether people get Parkinson’s or not,”

he affirms. “My personal impression is that

patients I have with Parkinson’s are

disproportionately professional people.”

Making the most of a disability seems key to the Borosons’ lives. Some people who were previously too busy with careers who now have disabilities have found opportunities to express themselves artistically, says Sarah, adding that her husband “always had projects and lots of drive. He was always curious and wanted to learn new [ways of doing] art.

“He’s not as focused as he used to be,” she concedes. Still, she says, “We’re gadabouts,” staying busy dining out a lot with friends, going to the theater, movies and concerts, especially chamber music. “It’s not good for people with Parkinson’s to stay at home,” says Sarah. “We take classes at Pima Community College and at the UA Humanities Seminars Program. Socializing keeps the brain active and is very good for people with Parkinson’s,” says Sarah, 81, who’s a part-time librarian at Pima Community College, and has started a Parkinson’s support group for members of the Sunflower community.

“I’ve gotten very interested in gardening,” says Elihu, with Sarah adding, “He goes to the gym daily, which stimulates the growth of brain cells.”

And, there’s no doubt that continuing his artwork still gives Elihu satisfaction. Sitting down at the table for some tea, he points out the uranium glaze he used on the teapot. Smiling, Elihu asks, “Who knew you could make something so beautiful out of something so terrible?”

For more information about monthly tours of the UA Parkinson’s Research Laboratory, call 626-2319 or visit http://medicine.arizona.edu/news/ua-college-medicine%E2%80%99s-parkinson%E2%80%99s-research-lab-holds-monthly-tours. For individual home tours of Elihu Boroson’s artwork, call 579-6852.

— Babylonian Talmud Tractate Sanhedrin 37a

Tucsonan Bryan Jaret-Schachter relaxes during his second donation of stem cells for a recipient identified by the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation. Blood from his right arm is fed through a machine to separate out the blood-forming cells, then returned to him via his left arm.

Bryan Jaret-Schachter, a 27-year-old financial analyst in Tucson, picked up the phone at work early one morning in September 2010 and was stunned by what he heard. The caller, a representative from the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation (giftoflife.org), told him that he was a preliminary match for a stem cell donation. The recipient would be a 39-year-old male with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The news of a match might surprise anyone, but for Jaret-Schachter it was especially significant. His good friend and former roommate, Richard Sims, had died of complications from Hodgkin’s lymphoma earlier that year. When Jaret-Schachter found out the match was for somebody with Hodgkin’s, he says, “I almost fell out of my chair!” Jaret-Schachter would later go on to donate stem cells not once, but twice, for this particular recipient.

The story behind the match, however, goes back to 2009, when Jaret-Schachter was on a Birthright Israel trip (a free educational, first-time trip to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18 to 26). There, he registered with a bone marrow database after hearing a presentation by the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, an organization that is especially interested in registering persons of Jewish descent.

“Everyone in our group, 41 in total, agreed to register, participating by getting their cheek swabbed,” he recounts. Even though he knew his friend Sims was not waiting for a bone marrow or stem cell transplant, it still seemed to him like an important thing to do. However, Jaret-Schachter admits, “I didn’t expect to hear from them.”

The day Jaret-Schachter returned to Tucson from Israel, he found out that Sims was in the hospital and not doing well. He rushed to the hospital and arrived in time to say goodbye. Sims passed away later that evening. The loss of his friend weighed heavily on Jaret-Schachter, especially in the days following the funeral. “Not many days would go by where I didn’t think about Rich, and how unfair it was for him to suffer through this ordeal,” he reflected in a blog he posted later for the Gift of Life Registry.

The phone call from Gift of Life, coming eight months after Sims’ death, seemed more than mere coincidence. The connection between his friend, his trip to Israel and the chance to save a life was not lost on him. “I’m not an extremely religious person,” he reflects, but “it was hard to deny the irony of the whole situation.” Jaret-Schachter felt this was a unique opportunity to honor the life of his friend, and an opportunity to affirm his ties to the Jewish community.

The stem cell donation, though simpler than a bone marrow donation, would end up requiring an extensive commitment of time and travel from Jaret-Schachter. Gift of Life flew him to New York City in September 2010 for a physical at the facility where the donation would take place. A month later, after five consecutive days of injections to stimulate stem cell growth, Jaret-Schachter traveled back to New York for the procedure, which took about seven hours. The main discomfort, says Jaret-Schachter, was being relatively immobile for that length of time. Fortunately, he’d brought his iPad with him to help pass the time.

Approximately six months after the first stem cell donation, Jaret-Schachter checked in with Gift of Life to inquire if it was safe for him to participate in a blood drive at work. To his surprise, Gift of Life called him back the next day to say the recipient of his original donation needed a follow-up donation. In March and April of 2011, Jaret-Schachter flew to New York twice more to complete the second donation. This time, he brought his work laptop to pass the time.

Jaret-Schachter is especially happy to have been able to help someone through the Gift of Life registry. “Their focus,” he explains, “is to get Jewish people involved, but anyone can donate. So many bloodlines were lost in the Holocaust. If you are Jewish and diagnosed, you are much less likely to find a match.” Last June, Jaret-Schachter flew on behalf of Gift of Life to a Jewish sleep-away camp in Denver, where he spoke to more than 50 counselors, alongside a former camper who had been diagnosed with leukemia. The majority of the counselors joined the registry.

Although Jaret-Schachter is curious about the man who received his stem cells, the donation will remain anonymous on both ends until his recipient passes the one-year mark since his last donation. Jaret-Schachter hopes to meet his recipient at the annual meeting of the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation this spring.

After four trips to New York in a span of six months, Jaret-Schachter has no qualms about donating his time and blood. What would he say to people who are reluctant to donate? “You’re giving somebody the chance to live who otherwise wouldn’t be able to,” says Jaret-Schachter. “It’s hard to overcome fears, but it is a tremendous opportunity … I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

Maria Ma-Tay Russakoff is a freelance writer living in Tucson with her husband and two sons.

Michael Cassolis

My personal experience with death happened when I was 14, far away from home, in a British boarding school. The housemaster summoned me to his study. This was normally a place where some sort of punishment was dished out. However, the circumstances this time were different. My housemaster, Mr. Marsden, called for me, and I waited patiently for an hour while he walked up and down the length of his study in front of me, then left the room abruptly. I had to ask his wife, who was also present, what was going on, why I had been called, and she apologized for her husband. The headmaster’s wife then told me in a kind and gentle way that my father had malaria, was sent to the Tropical Disease Hospital in London, and passed away.

That was a long time ago, in 1979, and today I am here with you in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave.” In my day-to-day work in hospice care, I have learned many people have a fear of death, even just talking about it. But working in the hospice field, I know this is a community filled with people who make it their life’s work to help terminally ill patients and their loved ones at one of the most difficult times of life. Hospice care provides these patients and their loved ones with medical, emotional and spiritual support.

Life after death is an unknown, and that lack of knowledge can create a fear of death. I would like to paraphrase a parable I read in “The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning” by Rabbi Maurice Lamm, which I hope offers some food for thought.

In the parable, twin brothers grow peacefully in their mother’s womb, the only world they know. After a time, they begin to notice that they are steadily getting lower in the womb, and they wonder what will happen if they are forced out of it.

Lamm calls the first infant a “believer, heir to a religious tradition that tells him there will be a new life.” The second infant is a skeptic who believes only in what can be demonstrated. The first brother imagines a world where he says they will “eat through the mouth” and “see great distances,” and the second brother says they will “sink into oblivion.”

Then the water inside the womb bursts and the first brother falls outward. The skeptical brother mourns at the sound of loud cries and general tumult. However, while the skeptic mourns, the other brother is being celebrated by a waiting family in the new world. “As we separate and die from the womb, only to be born to life, so we separate and die from our world, only to be reborn to life eternal,” writes Lamm.

Hospice’s holistic viewpoint can help patients approach death with faith, without fear. The aim of hospice care is to provide our patients the chance to die on their own terms, with dignity.

I know which twin I am. Which twin will you be?

Michael Cassolis works in professional relations at Casa de la Luz Hospice.

“Following Ezra” does not disappoint. The paperback cover, with its bright plastic dinosaurs marching across a blue field, promises a book filled with energy and fun. It’s not all sunshine and roses: there are harrowing accounts of Ezra’s tantrums; his overwhelming obsessions; his reckless oblivion to the danger of running across a street or climbing a rickety garden trellis.

But mostly this memoir is a celebration. Fields-Meyer recalls sitting in a therapist’s office soon after his 3-year-old son is diagnosed with autism. The therapist suggests that he needs to grieve “for the child he didn’t turn out to be.” Fields-Meyer resolves, instead, “to pour love on my son, to celebrate him, to understand, to support him, and to follow his lead.”

Fields-Meyer is a writer by profession, and dealing with the challenges of Ezra’s autism has, perhaps, made him an even keener and more insightful observer. In “Following Ezra” we get a remarkable glimpse into a mind that works differently from most. Ezra builds up storehouses of information, such as the release dates and running time of animated movies, which he finds comforting. He learns, painstakingly, that it is not OK to comment on people’s size and shape. And he connects with friends and neighbors in his own fashion, remembering not only their dogs’ names, ages and genders but sharing his prodigious knowledge of their breeds.

Ezra’s mother is Rabbi Shawn Fields-Meyer, and at one point “Are you Jewish?” becomes part of Ezra’s litany of questions, asked of everyone from his gym teacher to the waiter in an Italian restaurant. The author sees the question as a positive development: “He is gaining an awareness of religion and what it means. And at least he’s not asking why they’re fat.”

“Following Ezra” starts when Ezra is three and begins showing signs that his development is veering off track, and ends when he is 13, a Bar Mitzvah. The lessons learned by both father and son along the way make this an inspiring, uplifting read for any parent — or anyone interested in how we learn about life and love.

Sam Caron with Elwood

The benefits of being a ventriloquist have come full circle for Sam Caron. “At age 6 I was a very sick child” with rheumatic fever, says the Sierra Vista therapist, who has a Ph.D. in guidance and counseling from the University of New Mexico. “When I came home from the hospital as a child my aunt gave me a Jerry Mahoney-type puppet that went with me everywhere.” Caron, now 64, named the puppet Elwood, and he recently told the AJP, “It’s the only childhood toy I still have.”

When Caron was around 12 the family moved from Detroit to Albuquerque, N.M. Elwood went with them, although Caron didn’t perform with the puppet until he got his master’s degree in the early 1970s and started working in a hospital for developmentally impaired patients. “We would bring in people to entertain, but they would often get upset and leave,” says Caron. “I really got into it, not like the other entertainers.”

Caron later became a counselor in an Albuquerque elementary school. “I would use [Elwood] as an ice breaker” visiting classes, he recalls. “My use of puppets was growing, but I needed more girl puppets.” This was before the Internet, but through a magic and kite store in Albuquerque, Caron found someone who could help, commissioning a local puppet-maker to construct professional puppets that would be appropriate for developmental counseling in schools. Using the puppets to write scripts with students became one of Caron’s frequent therapy techniques. “I’m a believer that you educate and entertain simultaneously,” he says.

By the early 1980s, Caron had moved with his wife, Mary, and sons, Ben and Jeremy, to Sierra Vista, where he started a private counseling practice. “I bought more puppets, specifically for problems that children had,” he says, citing an abused teenager who used puppets to role play herself and the perpetrator in therapy. “It made her feel much better,” adds Caron.

The reception to Caron’s puppet therapy in schools and in his private practice was so gratifying that he produced 30-second radio spots with the puppets. Although Caron wasn’t nonprofit, “I wanted to give them to radio stations. I wanted to do a mitzvah,” he explains. Parents shopping with children in supermarkets was one of his topics, suggesting ways to prevent children from putting unwanted items in a shopping cart or from running around in the store. In the late ’80s, Caron wanted to produce a 30-minute TV program, but instead, spent a year airing improvisation pieces with Harvey Job Matusow, a clown and storytelling personality, on Tucson Community Cable Corporation, which is now Access Tucson public television.

Caron has also been part of the international puppet therapy scene, and has presented workshops at the Japanese Ventriloquists Association three times. “My goal is to write a series of books on the adventures of Dr. C and Elwood,” says Caron, who currently writes an online newsletter for parents of children with ADHD (adhd1.net), where he advises parents to share with their overly active 7-year-olds the three main symptoms of the disorder: “being hyperactive, acting fast without thinking first about the consequences or alternatives, and getting bored and distracted easily.”

In his private practice in Sierra Vista, Caron deals with a range of issues through puppet therapy. “A parent called me one day about her 4-year-old refusing to go to school,” he says. “Bring the child to my office with the understanding that she’ll be going to school,” Caron told the parent.

When they arrived at his office, he pulled out his dragon puppet, got in the car and started singing “we hate school,” with the puppet sitting on the girl’s shoulder. “She was thrilled with the puppet,” says Caron, adding that they had switched to “school is cool” by the time they got there. The previously school-hating little girl introduced the dragon puppet to her class, he notes, “giving her a new status.”

Caron, who is the major lay leader at Temple Kol Hamidbar in Sierra Vista, says that Elwood is Jewish. Caron has led Seders with his longtime puppet companion, performs a Chanukah song with Elwood on YouTube (youtube.com/watch?v=LtMjDZJCtqM&noredirect=1), and, he says, “Elwood comes to services with me.”

Caron’s sons, who also live in Sierra Vista, have inherited their father’s passion for puppets, and are both ventriloquists.

Having Elwood in his life has been therapeutic for Caron. “Six years ago I had triple bypass surgery. I took Elwood to University Medical Center with me. I was back to work in three weeks,” says Caron. And, he says, “Inputting my own creativity into my work makes it so much more fun for me.”

One in five Jewish individuals of Ashkenazi/Eastern European descent is a carrier for one or more Jewish genetic diseases, according to the center.

Southern Arizona residents ages 18 to 45 may be tested for $65. (The usual cost of these tests exceeds $3,000.) The Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona has arranged subsidies for five people to be tested at the reduced rate. Register at www.jewishgeneticsphx.org or contact Rebecca Goodman at 577-9393 or rgoodman@jfsa.org for more information.

The parents brought him to the pediatrician and then to a hospital pediatric care unit near their home in Rockville, Md., a suburb of Washington.

Benjamin soon was diagnosed with Riley-Day syndrome, now called familial dysautonomia, a genetic disease of the autonomic nervous system that disproportionately strikes Ashkenazi Jews.

When the Stillmans got married in 1995, they were tested for Tay-Sachs disease, the only genetic disease prevalent among Ashkenazim for which screening was available, and neither parent was found to be a carrier or to have the disease.

“Ignorance was bliss,” Susan Stillman said. “We had no idea we were carriers for FD.”

Today, tests are available for 19 chronic conditions that are known as Jewish genetic diseases, including familial dysautonomia. Testing capabilities have risen dramatically: a year ago, individuals could be tested for 16 conditions; in 2009, the number was 11. In addition to FD and Tay-Sachs, conditions include cystic fibrosis, Gaucher disease, Canavan disease and Niemann-Pick disease.

Organizations dealing with Jewish genetic diseases are intensifying their efforts to educate Ashkenazim of childbearing age about the need to be screened for all 19 conditions with a single blood test, and to update tests that have already been conducted. The experts view this as a serious communal health issue, with one in five Ashkenazim estimated to be a carrier of at least one of the 11 diseases that could be tested for in 2009.

A study by New York University’s Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan found that significant numbers of New York-area Ashkenazim — one in every 3.3 — are carriers of at least one of the 16 diseases tested for last year.

A carrier rate of one in 100 for an individual disease would be “of concern,” said Dr. Adele Schneider, director of clinical genetics at Philadelphia’s Victor Centers for Jewish Genetic Diseases.

As with any genetic disease, when both parents are carriers, each of their children will have a 25-percent likelihood of being affected; the more diseases for which each parent is a carrier, the greater the odds of the children being affected.

“If you and your spouse find out that you’re carriers, you may not want to take that one-in-four chance,” said Karen Litwack, director of the Chicago Center for Jewish Genetic Disorders. “It’s a terrible ordeal for parents to go through. From a Jewish community standpoint, there’s a general consensus that education and outreach will, hopefully, prevent this kind of thing from happening.”

Experts in Jewish genetic diseases are seeking to promote awareness of the potential problems, because screening before a pregnancy can offer options for preventing or dramatically reducing the chance of a child being born with a disease. The four main alternative options are utilizing a sperm donor; utilizing an egg donor; pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (in-vitro fertilization of the mother’s egg, analysis of the embryo, and implantation only if the embryo is healthy); and even aborting a fetus affected by both parents’ disease-carrying genes.

“Screening is protecting future generations,” said Randy Yudenfriend-Glaser, who chairs the New York-based Jewish Genetic Disease Consortium. She is the mother of two adult children with mucolipidosis type IV, one of the known Jewish genetic diseases.

“When you’re young and getting married, you don’t want to know about it because it’s scary,” she said. “But you should want to know about it.”

Experts also emphasize the need for each carrier to be screened prior to each pregnancy to account for additions to the screening panel in the interim.

Several organizations are expanding their outreach to rabbis and Jewish communal leaders to enlist their help in persuading prospective parents to get tested. Even doctors don’t push sufficiently for testing, representatives of these groups say.

The Victor Centers’ survey in April of 100 Atlanta-area obstetricians, gynecologists, primary care physicians and pediatricians found only 51 percent routinely recommend preconception screening and just 34 percent recommend updated screenings between pregnancies.

Laura Kafif, the house mother at Sava A Child’s Heart, visits with one of her charges, Zeresenay Gebru, as he recovers from heart surgery at Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, Israel, May 31, 2011. (Sheila Shalhevet/JTA Photo Service)

Just two days earlier, 8-year-old Salha Farjalla Khamis said goodbye to her parents and four siblings in her village on the African island of Zanzibar.

Now, in a hospital in the Tel Aviv suburb of Holon, tears roll silently down her cheeks as she watches an Israeli nurse attach the wires of an EKG monitor to her small body.

“Mama!” she cries out as the Israeli nurse, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union, tries to soothe her in a language the little girl does not understand.

“Don’t cry, no pain,” the nurse says in broken English.

Khamis is on her second trip to Israel for an operation to remedy a heart defect that she has had since birth. Brought by the Israeli humanitarian organization Save a Child’s Heart, she is one of 2,600 children who have benefitted from the program launched by an American Jewish immigrant to Israel to provide cardiac surgery for children from the developing world.

The story of the effort begins in 1996, when a charismatic cardiac surgeon from Maryland named Amram Cohen started treating patients from outside Israel and using his home, and those of his patients and friends, to host them.

Since then, patients from 42 countries have been helped by the organization, nearly half of them Palestinian children from the West Bank and Gaza. Others have come from Iraq, Nigeria and Romania.

Save a Child’s Heart also trains medical staff from developing countries, and leads surgical and teaching missions abroad.

Dr. Lior Sasson, the organization’s lead surgeon and head of the cardiothoracic surgery department at the Wolfson Medical Center in Holon, operates on the children on his own time. He helped perform the organization’s first surgery 15 years ago with Cohen, who was then his mentor.

Just six years later Cohen, who had operated on some 600 children through Save a Child’s Heart, died of high altitude sickness while climbing Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, a country from which many of the treated children come.

This August, the organization will hold a fundraising climb in Cohen’s memory at Kilimanjaro that it hopes will bring in $1 million.

“These are children who would otherwise be doomed to die within a few years and suddenly are getting their lives back and their parents again live with hope,” Sasson tells JTA in a sunny waiting room just after completing a surgery.

“And when it comes to the Palestinian kids, you see how Palestinian families go from seeing Israelis as sworn enemies to seeing how we all join forces to save these kids together. It’s better than 1,000 diplomats. We are working with people. They get to know us, we get to know them.”

In May, the organization was recommended for special consultative status with the U.N. Economic and Social Council. If granted, Save a Child’s Heart will be able to participate in various U.N. forums, including the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva.

Every week, new arrivals from around the world arrive at a large stucco house surrounded by palm trees at the end of a quiet, residential street in Holon — their home during their time in the country.

On a recent morning, Khamis’ group from Zanzibar arrived shortly after dawn, bleary eyed from the long trip. Children under age 4 were accompanied by their mothers cloaked in bright African print scarves and dresses. These mothers also become caretakers to the older children, who because of space and financial constraints travel without a parent.

A child’s surgery and post-operative care typically costs $10,000, all of which is covered through donations to Save a Child’s Heart.

“My baby needs surgery. She loses weight all the time. She needs to get better so she can play with the other children,” says Mati Ali, 27, who knew practically nothing about Israel before a doctor referred her to the program.

Soon the children are bundled into taxis en route to Wolfson Medical Center, where they will meet up with fellow new arrivals from Angola.

Upstairs from the African patients, Palestinian patients are attending a weekly clinic. The long corridor is filled with mothers in floor-length black dresses and headscarves holding babies.

Akiva Tamir, the pediatric cardiologist who oversees the clinic, says the Palestinian patients are fortunate because their proximity to Israel means they will be treated at a younger age, before damage from either congenital or acquired heart disease has time to intensify.

Godwin Godfry, a 31-year-old general surgeon from Tanzania, is in the midst of a six-year stint training in Israel. When he finishes, Godfry will go back to the city of Mwanza on the shores of Lake Victoria in northern Tanzania. He will be one of the only pediatric cardiac surgeons in the country.

“In our hospital alone, we have a waiting list of 300 children to be treated for heart disease,” he says, but no doctor is available to treat them.

The range of cardiac cases Godfry sees while helping treat children from the program makes his time in Israel that much more valuable, he says, because he can treat in a western setting patients with the illnesses usually found only in the developing world.

“Here you learn how things should be done,” Godfry says.

At Wolfson’s pediatric intensive care unit, most of the beds on a recent day are occupied by children recovering from surgery performed by Godwin’s mentor, Sasson.

Smiling from a bed in the far corner is Zeresenay Gebru, 15, from Ethiopia. Earlier in the day, he had surgery to replace the battery in a pacemaker he received from Save a Child’s Heart when he was 6.

“I would like to thank all the doctors and the volunteers,” the teenager says, adding that he wants to be a cardiologist. “They gave me my heart back.”

According to the United States Cancer Statistics Incidence and Mortality Web-based Report, which compares the rates of cancer across 49 states, six metropolitan areas and the District of Columbia, Arizona ranks 50th and 49th in key categories.

“This is a case where being last means you are doing well,” says Wayne Tormala, chief of the Arizona Department of Health Services Bureau of Tobacco & Chronic Disease. “Being 50th means our rates are the lowest.”

Arizona has the lowest incidence of all cancers combined among men and women, the lowest rate of cancers among men, and the second lowest rate of all cancers among women.

“Of course, the news that Arizona has the lowest cancer rates of the 50 states is extremely welcome,” says David S. Alberts, M.D., director of the Arizona Cancer Center, told the AJP

“Unfortunately,” says Alberts, “our lowest rates are extremely high when compared to other continents, and cancer continues to be the leading cause of death (2:1 compared to heart disease) for all of us under age 85.

“A major reason why Arizona’s cancer rates are lower relates to our larger Hispanic and Native American populations that have relatively low rates of the common cancers. Sadly, because of the acculturation of these populations to the Western lifestyle (i.e. high fat, low fruit and vegetables diet, together with low levels of leisure time physical activity), Arizona’s cancer rates will begin to rise dramatically into the mid-21st century. So, we must put a much greater effort into reducing tobacco use and excessive alcohol intake, while improving nutrition and increasing physical activity, observing American Cancer Society breast, colon, and cervix screening guidelines, and following guidelines for vaccinations against hepatitis A and B and the human papilloma virus,” says Alberts.

While Arizona’s overall rates of cancer may be lower than in other states, according to the Arizona Cancer Registry, more people in Arizona are diagnosed with cancer at later stages.

“This truly makes the case for early detection and screening,” says Sharlene Bozack, chief government relations officer, American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network Great West Division.

ACS screening guidelines recommend:

• yearly mammograms for women starting at age 40

• a prostate exam (PSA) every 1-2 years for men over age 45, dependent upon personal risk factors

• a colonoscopy every 10 years for men and women over age 50