Grieving husband pushes bill for unproven remedies

This undated photo issued by M&CSaatchi, shows best-selling Irish novelist Josephine Hart, the wife of Lord Saatchi. who died from ovarian cancer in 2011. Lord Maurice Saatchi describes his wife’s cancer treatment as “medieval”, and is proposing a parliamentary bill to legalize the ability of doctors to use experimental therapies even if there is no proof they work. Saatchi acknowledges his bill, aimed at encouraging new therapies and speeding up access to new drugs, is driven by grief at his wife’s death, and that it may not make it into law, but he has wide support from numerous members of parliament and he remains hopeful about giving new opportunities to doctors and their patients. (AP Photo/Monique Henry, M&CSaatchi)

LONDON (AP) — After the best-selling Irish novelist Josephine Hart died from ovarian cancer in 2011, her husband was so devastated he often went to her grave to have breakfast.

And even now, Lord Maurice Saatchi describes his wife's cancertreatment as "medieval." A member of Parliament, he's proposing a bill that would allow doctors to use experimental therapies even if there is no proof they work.

Hart and Saatchi were an oft-photographed celebrity couple inBritain more than a decade ago. She produced plays in London's West End and hosted poetry readings featuring actors including Ralph Fiennes and Roger Moore. Her 1991 novel "Damage" was turned into a film starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche.

Saatchi, an advertising executive who sits in the House of Lords, acknowledges his bill was driven by grief at his wife's death.

After a diagnosis in 2009 that her cancer was too advanced for surgery, Hart got chemotherapy and radiation, which Saatchi calls "degrading and ineffective."

Though ovarian cancer is one of the hardest to catch and treat early, Saatchi says Britain's current law is a serious barrier to new treatments. Theoretically doctors can be prosecuted if they try something that deviates from standard practice.

His bill is aimed at encouraging new therapies by allowing doctors to try them, including those lacking evidence of effectiveness. The decision would have to be made by several medical experts in different fields and doctors would need to tell their supervisors in advance as well as inform the patient of any opposing medical opinions.

While bills initiated by individual politicians rarely make it into law, Saatchi's proposal has raised a broader issue about British health care: Survival rates for most cancers are worse than in other European countries including France, Germany and the United States. A report released this month said Britain ranked 16th out of 19 Western countries for ovarian cancer death rates.

Access to drugs is so poor the government started a >200 million (US$302 million) emergency fund in 2010 to try getting patients quicker treatment; the U.K. spends about half what France spends on cancer drugs.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the five-year survival rate for breast cancer in the U.S. is 89 percent. In the U.K., it is 81 percent.

After the cancer drug Avastin was approved for use in the U.S., it took nearly another year for it to become available in Britain. For Tykerb, the delay was more than two years. Avastin is used to treat numerous cancers including those of the kidney, colon, lung and breast while Tykerb is used to treat breast cancer in combination with other drugs.

In a debate on Saatchi's bill in the House of Lords in January, Lord Frederick Howe, a government health minister, lamented the contrast between Britain's role as a world leader in health research and its lagging approval of new treatments for patients.

"It still takes an estimated average of 17 years for only 14 percent of new scientific discoveries to enter day-to-day clinical practice," he said. "This is not acceptable."

Several other members voiced support for Saatchi, citing other problems that have slowed medical advances, including bureaucracy and slashed budgets.

Some experts suggest that if Saatchi's bill doesn't make it into law in its current form, its key planks might be rolled into a government-sponsored bill, making it much likelier to succeed. Saatchi has even been advised by the U.K.'s top medical officer."We're very sympathetic to the points that Lord Saatchi has raised," said Daniel Poulter, a minister in the Department of Health, during a televised discussion with Saatchi. "We'd certainly like to engage further."

Legal experts said current British law should be sufficient to protect doctors who try experimental procedures as long as there is some reason to think they might work and the patient agrees. But a High Court judge ruled in 1957 that doctors could be found negligent if they used treatments that strayed from common practice, setting a precedent often cited in medical negligence lawsuits. In that case, the judge ruled that doctors must act in accordance with what the majority of doctors do, even if there are opposing medical views.

According to National Health Service records, the number of medical negligence suits has jumped by about 30 percent since 2010. Though it is rare for doctors to be penalized for using new treatments, experts said many doctors are wary.

"Doctors are very fearful that if they do anything innovative, the lawyers will get them," said Charles Foster, who teaches medical law and ethics at Oxford University. "There's a culture of following guidelines where they think they will only be safe if they treat patients conservatively," he explained.

Foster said Saatchi's bill could be important in addressing doctors' misconceptions of what the law allows. "It could change the zeitgeist of the medical profession and make them more willing to try new things," he said.

Still, some aren't convinced Saatchi's bill would help speed new treatments. Dr. Karol Sikora, director of CancerPartners U.K., a network of treatment centers and dean of the medical school at the University of Buckingham, think's the proposal is superfluous.

"If the doctor wants to do it and the patient consents, people can do wacky things," Sikora said, citing the alternative medicine industry, where there is little evidence treatments work. He also said the bill could encourage false hope among terminal patients.

Saatchi doesn't know whether his bill would have helped his wife. Ultimately, he said, it's about giving patients and doctors new opportunities in the future. "This bill is not going to cure cancer, but it will encourage the man or woman who will," he said.

Syria's war affects generation of children

BEIRUT (AP) — Mohammed works at a Beirut supermarket where he waits on customers and carries their groceries home for a small tip that the 14-year-old saves to send later to his family in a village in northeastern Syria.

He is among hundreds of thousands of Syrian children who have dropped out of school and fled two years of conflict that have claimed the lives of more than 70,000 people.

He is also one of countless young Syrians now frequently seen wandering the streets of Beirut, pumping gas at stations and sometimes begging for money.

Aid groups warn that some 2 million children in Syria are facing, among other things, malnutrition, disease, early marriage and severe trauma as a result of the civil war.

To mark the second anniversary of the uprising against President Bashar Assad, the Britain-based charity Save the Children released a report Wednesday entitled "Childhood Under Fire." It says the conflict has left many children traumatized, unable to go to school and struggling to find enough to eat.

"I have to say I have been shocked and horrified by the stories that I've heard from the children here in Lebanon who fled from Syria," Justin Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children, told The Associated Press at the group's offices in Beirut.

"You never want to hear a child talk about watching their friend killed or their father tortured in front of them or their brother shot through the leg," added Forsyth, who spent several days in Lebanon last week meeting children among the estimated 320,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to the neighboring country.

Syria's children will need decades to heal from the trauma, he warned.

Similarly, a report issued by UNICEF Tuesday said unrelenting violence, massive population displacement, and damage to infrastructure and essential services caused by the Syrian conflict risk leaving an entire generation of children scarred for life.

"As millions of children inside Syria and across the region witness their past and their futures disappear amidst the rubble and destruction of this prolonged conflict, the risk of them becoming a lost generation grows every day," said UNICEF Executive Director Anthony Lake.

The report said that in areas where the fighting is most intense, few people have access to fresh water. Also, one in five schools has been destroyed, damaged, or is being used to shelter displaced families.

In Aleppo, the center of months of fighting, only 6 percent of children are attending school, the report said.

At the same time, children are traumatized by seeing family members and friends killed and terrified by the sounds and scenes of conflict.

While the reports did not give a number of children killed or wounded in the civil war, the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, a key activist group that keeps tracks of Syria's dead, wounded and missing persons, says that some 5,500 children under the age of 15, including 3,800 boys and 1,700 girls, have been killed in the past two years.

VDC also says 901 boys and 28 girls are in detention while about 100 children are missing.

Forsyth said the 5,500 figure "is very conservative. A lot of children have been killed and injured."

Children in Syria were targeted early on in the uprising that began in March 2011, and rights groups routinely report on teenagers imprisoned and sometimes beaten and tortured.

One of the most shocking cases was that of Hamza al-Khatib, 13, who was from the southern village of Jiza in Daraa province, where the uprising first broke out after security forces arrested high school students who scrawled anti-regime graffiti on a wall.

Al-Khatib was arrested at an anti-government demonstration on April 29, 2011 and not seen again until his mutilated body, with his penis severed, was delivered to his family weeks later. Al-Khatib became a symbol of the revolt, driving thousands of protesters into the streets.

Countless other amateur videos have been posted by activists showing children who were killed by shooting, shelling or air raids. Some were only weeks-old.

Save the Children, which provides humanitarian relief in Syria and neighboring countries, called on all groups taking part in the conflict to allow unfettered, safe access to populations in need and to "ensure that everything is done to bring fighting to an end."

In the report, it said that young boys are being used by armed groups as porters and human shields at the front lines. It added that some girls are being married off early to protect them from a widely perceived threat of sexual violence. Both sides of the conflict in Syria have accused each other of using children to protect themselves.

"The majority of people who are raped in war are usually children and that probably is the case in Syria," said Forsyth. He added that they don't have exact numbers but "I have interviewed children who were sexually harassed."

The report says that combined with the breakdown of society in parts of the country, and more than 3 million people internally displaced, the conflict has led to "the collapse of childhood for millions of youngsters."

The number of U.N.-registered refugees topped 1 million — half of them children — earlier this month.

Mohammed, the Beirut supermarket employee, stopped going to school after it closed because of the fighting. As the eldest of three siblings, he was sent by his family to Beirut to stay with his maternal uncle, hoping he could find work to help sustain the family.

"I make about 15,000 pounds ($10) a day," said the portly boy from the northeastern village of Shadadeh in Hassakeh province, which witnessed heavy clashes last month forcing thousands of its residents to flee.

"If I don't send money to my family, they won't be able to buy anything," he said. Mohammed gave only his first name, fearing for his security.

At a Beirut gas station, Suleiman, a teenager wearing a T-shirt and a blue baseball cap, spends his day washing cars.

"The fighting and shelling were terrifying in my city," said the boy from the oil-rich eastern city of Deir el-Zour near the border with Iraq — an area that sees almost daily fighting between troops and rebels.

Forsyth said even though children are by nature resilient, the trauma they have been through will have a long-term impact on their lives.

"For millions of Syrian children, the innocence of childhood has been replaced by the cruel realities of trying to survive this vicious war."

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Syria troops, rebels clash in northern Damascus

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian government troops fought fierce battles with rebels on Wednesday for control of key neighborhoods in the north of Damascus, residents and activists said.

Also, a European Union staff member was killed in a rocket attack on an opposition stronghold south of the capital, the EU said.

Opposition fighters trying to topple President Bashar Assad have been trying to advance into Damascus for weeks, battering regime checkpoints and military bases in the heavily fortified capital. They have also fired mortars into residential districts and into the capital's main football stadium, sowing fear among residents.

Both sides see Damascus as the ultimate prize in the civil war.

The state-run SANA news agency said two mortar rounds exploded near an orphanage in al-Boukhtyar area of Damascus on Wednesday, killing and wounding an unknown number of people.

It was not immediately clear if any of the casualties were in the orphanage.

The pro-government Al-Ekhbariya TV aired footage of the attacks, showing houses and cars on fire and firefighters working to extinguish the flames. People were shown weeping and cursing the rebels.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday's clashes were concentrated in the capital's neighborhoods of Jobar and Barzeh.

A resident in the area said shelling overnight "shook apartments" and terrified the inhabitants. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared for his safety.

A car bomb exploded outside a police station in Khan Sheih neighborhood, west of Damascus, the Observatory said. The Britain-based activist group also said fierce clashes broke out after the blast but had no immediate reports of casualties.

Fighting also raged in other Syrian cities, including Homs, where the military pounded rebel positions with artillery and carried out several airstrikes on the Baba Amr district, a former rebel stronghold which the opposition has tried to recapture in the past days.

In Brussels, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said a policy officer with the European delegation in Syria was killed on Tuesday in the Damascus suburb of Daraya. It was the first death of an EU employee in the Syrian civil war.

Ahmad Shihadeh, 32, worked for the EU for five years, a spokesman for Ashton said Wednesday. He said Shihadeh had lived in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus that has been one of the main battlefields in the capital.

Ashton said he "died while providing humanitarian help to the community of Daraya," Ashton said. "Ahmad was known for his courage and selflessness."

Ashton took the occasion to call for an end to the conflict, which started in March 2011 as protests against Assad's authoritarian rule. The revolt turned into civil war after some opposition supporters took up arms to fight back a harsh government crackdown on dissent.

"As we approach the second anniversary of the uprising in Syria, I call again on all sides to take urgent steps to end the violence, which has led to the deaths of some 100,000 innocent citizens and over 1 million refugees seeking shelter in neighboring countries," she said.

According to U.N. figures, more than 70,000 people have been killed in the 2-year-old conflict and four millions Syrians driven from their homes. There was no immediate explanation of Aston's higher death toll.

Also Wednesday, a Ukrainian journalist who was kidnapped in Syria last year and escaped after being held by rebels for more than 150 days spoke of her ordeal to The Associated Press in Damascus.

Ankhar Kochneva said she was held by members of the Farouk Brigade of the Free Syrian Army in the central Homs province. She said in a phone interview that she "almost died" because of the shelling of the area she had been held, and that food was scarce while in captivity.

Kochneva wrote for Syrian and Russian newspapers before she was kidnapped in western Syria on Oct. 9. On Tuesday, Ukraine's Foreign Ministry confirmed that the journalist was freed.

In a phone interview Wednesday, the reporter told the AP she escaped from the house where she was being held while the guards were sleeping. She said she skirted a rebel guard post and fled with the assistance of villagers working in nearby fields.

She said no ransom was paid for her release.

"I would not want to buy my life, because they will by weapons with the money to kill civilians," she said.

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Ahmadinejad Ribbed by Clerics for Hugging Chavez’s Grieving Mom

By Russell Goldman
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Mar 13, 2013 1:14pm

(Image Credit: Miraflores Press Office/AP Photo)