A Groundhog With Cancer Can Still Teach

You don't need to smoke cigarettes to get cancer. This groundhog, humanely dispatched just this past weekend, had a very large and visible tumor under his front leg (the bottom leg in this picture). Though still active, there is little doubt this groundhog's movements were soon going to be seriously compromised.

Groundhogs have about a 70 pecent mortality rate every year. While there is a fair amount of predation of young groundhogs by hawks and fox, an adult groundhog fears only coyotes, man and dogs.

So what kills adult groundhogs? A certain number, like this fellow here, die from tumors, cancer, and hepatitis, but most seem to expire from pneumonia as they overwinter. They simply go to ground and never reappear.

Cornell University claims to have the only disease-free groundhog population in the world -- a population they use to study cancer and hepatitis B tranmission in humans.

For those worried about such things, a human cannot get the woodchuck hepatitis virus (WHV). That said, woodchuck hepatitis is similar enough to human hepatitis that the groundhog is one of the the best animals in the world for studying the disease (the only other good animal candidate is the chimpanzee).

Based on groundhog research, scientists at Cornell University discovered a hepatitis B vaccine. They also discoverd that hepatitis B is a major cause of both liver cancer and cirrhosis.

An estimated 250 to 300 million people, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, are carriers of the human hepatitis B virus, and cirrhosis and liver cancer kill about one million people, worldwide, every year.

Bottom line: if you want to avoid liver cancer, get a Hepatitis B vaccine.

And thank a groundhog.

.