User:Murella/The Bronze Killer

The Bronze Killer is a book written and published by Marie Warder with two urgent purposes in mind: Firstly, to sound the alert so that others would not have to go through the same thing her family had endured because of ignorance on their part or that of their physicians; and, secondly, to share all that her family’s bitter experience had taught her with anyone who was not familiar with hemochromatosis. It has also become the story of the Canadian Hemochromatosis Society, the Haemochromatosis Society of Southern Africa, and the International Association of Haemochromatosis Societies,of which she was the president for many years. “Iron…the other side of the storyItalic text!” on the other hand, evolved from a brief she prepared in 1983 for the Hon. Tom Siddon, Member of Parliament for Richmond, British Columbia, to be passed on by him to the Federal Minister of Health in Ottawa. That brief, to which she kept adding new information, became the ammunition with which she would tirelessly bombard succeeding governments, provincial, federal and otherwise, in Canada and overseas.

In 1990 it certainly had the desired effect in South Africa where the then Minister of Health, Doctor Rina Venter, to her credit, immediately contacted the Director General of Genetic Services who wrote: “We are highly impressed by the evidence you have collected and summarised,regarding the importance of Haemochromatosis as a genetic disease in South Africa and on the potentials for preventing its consequences. “Your efforts, as outlined, fully coincide with our objectives, i.e. to promote the prevention of inherited diseases and/or their consequences by the means at our disposal.”

Always on the lookout for someone who might listen, she missed few opportunities to try and enlighten. She sent her information to health food stores, talk show hosts and medical labs, and she even sent it to the editor of a “down under” publication called “The Southern Cross”, a complimentary copy of which she happened to pick up on a street corner in London. Prompted by a program on lead poisoning, she sent it to the BBC in England to enlighten whoever might read it, about the ravages of iron overload. In 1984, after what was by now more than just a brief had been subjected to the scrutiny of Professor Leslie Valberg -- Canada’s most respected researcher -- and had been given his valued approval, it was printed in the form of a booklet: later to provide some of the funds necessary to launch her first Hemochromatosis Awareness Week in 1987. In 1988 it was decided to include it in “The Bronze Killer” as the first "layman’s reference on hemochromatosis".

Notes

Warder's book The Bronze Killer, -- which was cited in her award for the Canada Volunteer Medal of Honour and Certificate of Honour -- was the first devoted entirely to the subject of the genetic disorder haemochromatosis. The term "Bronze Killer" has been used, among others, in the Toronto Star, in British newspapers, in the magazine supplement of the Johannesburg Sunday Expres[14] and in a Quebec French issue of the Reader's Digest, where it is called “La tueuse au masque du bronze”. Haemochromatosis was referred to as "the bronze killer" in an editorial by Clement Finch, Professor of Medicine Emeritus of the University of Washington, in the Western Journal of Medicine, September 1990. Since this book was first published in 1989, thousands of families around the world have found The Bronze Killer to be a valuable resource. More than just the personal account of a family who have suffered through the ravages of this terrible disease, it has been a source of information, encouragement and enlightenment to many.