Hematology The science encompassing the generation, anatomy, physiology, pathology, and therapeutics of blood.
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NEWS, Pg. A36Newsday (New York, NY)
November 26, 2001 Monday NASSAU AND SUFFOLK EDITION
Jet Crash Near Zurich Kills 24
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Zurich, Switzerland - Switzerland mourned again yesterday after a fiery plane crash near Zurich's airport killed 24 people, most of them foreigners - the latest in a string of deadly incidents that has shaken the Alpine nation.
(snip)DRS [German-language Swiss television station] also said three prominent Israelis reported on the plane were killed. They were identified by Israeli officials as Yaakov Matzner, 54, dean of the Hebrew University school of medicine; another leading doctor, Amiram Eldor, 59; and Avishai Berkman, 50, a Tel Aviv city official.
Authorities said there was no reason to suspect terrorism in the crash.
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FRONT; Pg. A04The Record (Kitchener-Waterloo)
November 27, 2001 Tuesday Final Edition
Officials probe Swiss plane crash; Plane may have been flying too low on its approach to runway, reports indicate
ASSOCIATED PRESS; CANADIAN PRESS
ZURICH -- Swiss officials sent the flight recorders from a shattered plane to Paris yesterday for inspection, hoping for clues about the crash that killed 24 people, including a Canadian man and an American singer.
Seven passengers and two crew members survived the crash, climbing out of the tail section after the Crossair Jumbolino Avro RJ-100 went down in the woods near the Zurich airport Saturday night after a flight from Berlin.
The voice and flight-data recorders were being sent to Paris for examination in the presence of a neutral investigator, officials said. One member of the investigative team must be from a country that had no involvement in the crash. "I hope we will have the results by tomorrow or the day after," said Jean Overney, chief of the Swiss Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau.(snip)
Rain mixed with snow was falling and visibility was poor when the plane crashed just after 10 p.m.
Airport officials said communication was normal until it suddenly disappeared from radar. Some reports have indicated the plane was flying too low on its approach.
The plane was trying to land on a runway used for night flights under a new agreement to limit flight noise over nearby Germany. Swiss officials have since suspended nighttime use of the runway, which was said to be more difficult than others to approach.(snip)
Officials in Israel said three prominent Israelis were killed: Yaakov Matzner, 54, dean of the Hebrew University school of medicine; Amiram Eldor, 59, a leading doctor; and Avishai Berkman, 50, a Tel Aviv city official.
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FEATURES; Pg. 7The Jerusalem Post
December 7, 2001
A prince of hematology
Wendy Elliman
IN MEMORIAM
When Amiram Eldor's name was posted among the missing in the Crossair plane that crashed into a forest near Kloten, November 24, his friends had little hope he was alive.
"Had Amiram survived the crash, even if he were hurt, he would have risked his life to go back in and help others," says his friend of 40 years, Yacov Berlatzky, professor of vascular surgery at the Hadassah-Hebrew University School of Medicine in Jerusalem. "He wouldn't have thought to save himself and run. That's the kind of person he was, always there for others." Within hours, his friends' fears were confirmed. Prof. Amiram Eldor, prominent hematologist, head of Ichilov Hospital's Hematology Institute in Tel Aviv, was dead at 59, along with his colleague Prof. Yaacov Matzner. Both were killed in the jetliner crash as the plane was approaching Zurich's Kloten Airport. Eldor was buried at the Yarkon Cemetery near Petah Tikva last Friday.
"It's so hard to believe," says Esti Katz. Her late husband, Shmuel (Shmulik) roomed with Eldor for six years when they were medical students. He always referred to him as his "first wife."
"He was a man who loved being alive, who loved life. He had endless energy, and enjoyed both the big things and the small - good food and nice clothes, swimming and reading, movies and theater. He loved the practice of medicine. Most of all, he loved people, be they friends, colleagues or patients. In the three years since Shmulik died, Amiram would call me almost daily to check I was OK."
Born in Tel Aviv in 1942, Eldor studied medicine at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Faculty in Jerusalem. He stayed at Hadassah until 1993, first in internal medicine and then specializing in hematology. The friends he made there as a student and young physician remain a tight-knit group to this day. Along with Katz and Berlatzky, they include Prof. Daniel Shouval, head of Hadassah's Liver Institute, and Prof. Moshe Garti, head of the Internal Medicine Center at the The Rabin Medical Center-Beilinson Campus, Petah Tikva. Many of them, like Eldor, have become internationally known in their fields.
Eldor not only gained wide recognition for his own work, he also nurtured Israel's coming generation of hematologists.
"He was my role model," says Prof. Dina Ben-Yehuda, today head of the Hematology Department at Hadassah. "He was a prince of hematology - a gifted physician, an internationally acclaimed researcher, and the finest of teachers. With it all, he was a wonderful human being. His jokes are classics that we still tell in the department. And he really cared about people, whoever they were.
"When Dr. Shmuel Gilles of our department was murdered by terrorists on his way home to Efrat last year, [Who is this?] Amiram's grief was total. It was the first time I ever saw him completely silent, unable to find words. At a memorial ceremony we're holding for Shmuel this February 7, Amiram was to present the first Gilles Prize in Hematology," says Ben-Yehuda.
"He was my colleague and my very good friend," says Prof. Ella Neparstek, head of the Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation at Ichilov and, since Eldor's death, acting head of Ichilov's Hematology Institute. "We worked together for many years, first at Hadassah where he was a senior hematologist when I began my fellowship in hematology, and later, after we'd both moved to Ichilov. He was an excellent teacher and from him I learned more than I can say. He was helpful and creative, both in his work and in his life, and never short of suggestions for solving problems."
The decade that Eldor spent in Tel Aviv after leaving Hadassah in 1993 to head Ichilov's Hematology Institute was his most prolific in both basic and clinical research, says Neparstek. Every week, he went up to Hadassah, whose academic atmosphere he loved, to continue his research, managing to combine his work there and at Ichilov very successfully and peaceably.
His most recent focus was on thrombosis and coagulation systems. One study on which he was engaged when he died involved women at high risk for spontaneous abortion. He suspected that repeated miscarriages may be caused by a blockage in the arteries of the placenta; he was hopeful that a low-molecular weight form of heparin, an anti-clotting drug with fewer side effects that the usual heparin drug, could prevent spontaneous abortion.
Fifteen years earlier, he was part of a team that identified eight new anti-clotting agents, for five of which he filed patents. These rare agents were found in the saliva of the leech. Eldor and his colleagues maintained a "farm" of 200 French and Welsh leeches at Hadassah, which they "milked" to constitute a continuous production line of pure leech saliva. Their work attracted considerable interest, and two foreign pharmaceutical houses worked with Eldor's team to unravel and synthesize the chemical structure of the new compounds.
The discovery that leech saliva contains not a single anti-clotting agent, but a cocktail of anti-coagulants taught Eldor an important lesson. "We must ask ourselves why this is so," he said in a 1988 interview with Hadassah Magazine. "The answer would seem to be that one drug in isolation is not enough. To be effective - and in the leech's case, this means being able to get sufficient food, which means life itself - perhaps a cocktail of different compounds works better than one in isolation. Doctors have already arrived at this truth in chemotherapy. Perhaps the chemotherapy experience together with the leech's technique teaches us we can best combat thromboses by mixing aggregation inhibitors."
This was a lesson which he taught to others and applied to his future research. Hematology in Israel will take five to 10 years to recover from the loss of Eldor and his colleague Yaacov Matzner, believes Prof. Shlomo Mor- Yosef, director-general of the Hadassah Medical Organization.
For his family and his large communities of friends in both Jerusalem and Tel Aviv it will take far longer, "perhaps a lifetime," says Berlatsky. His elder son, Roy, like his father a graduate of Hadassah's Medical School, has followed his father into internal medicine at Hadassah. His second son, Eran, is studying civil engineering at the Technion in Haifa. And Eldor's widow, Sofia, a well-known town planner with Modi'in in her portfolio, remains in Tel Aviv.
They, like his friends, colleagues and patients, treasure the memory a man who was "always upbeat, and had a keen sense of humor," according to Neparstek. "A very generous man, with many friends," says Ben-Yehuda,
"A kind person, who was always totally there for you," says Edith Shneidman, Hematology Institute secretary at Ichilov. "He was warm and strong, yet always kind and gentle."