UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, November 12. 1996
7
Army investigates misconduct
New allegations plague military
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Army is casting its net very wide to find out how pervasive sexual harassment may be in light of the sex scandal at a Maryland training center, Joint Chiefs Chairman John Shalikashvili said yesterday.
A separate Army investigation is looking into sexual misconduct allegations, ranging from rape to fraternization, among supervisors at an Army training base in Missouri, but no charges have
been filed, Army sources said.
Shalikashvili, making the rounds of television talk shows in honor of Veterans Day, was asked whether he had any evidence sexual abuse was occurring at other training sites.
"We certainly have to assume that it could be happening somewhere else, and that's why the Army is casting its net very wide all across the Army, and certainly all training centers, to get to the bottom of this," he said on CBS "This Morning."
More than 1,700 phone calls have been made to a toll-free hotline set up at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, near Baltimore.
Ed Starnes, an Aberdeen representative, said calls had been coming in from across the country since the scandal
"As soon as you are off, another rings," he said, adding that some complaints go back to World War II.
broke last week.
The Army filed criminal charges against three military trainers and administrative charges against two more, all of whom are married, at the Ordnance Center in Aberdeen.
The men, facing charges from rape to sending improper love letters to trainees, were accused of harassing at least a dozen women early in their training.
The men, four drill instructors and a captain, were suspended along with 15 other instructors who were placed on paid administrative duty.
One instructor threatened to kill three trainees if they told superiors he was haw-
ing sex with them, the Army said in documents released over the weekend.
A senior Army official said yesterday, speaking on condition of anonymity, that at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., an ongoing investigation also was looking into allegations of sexual misconduct, from rape to fraternization.
No charges have been filed in connection with those allegations.
The official said the Missouri investigation had been going on since September and was not started because of similar allegations emerging from Aberdeen.
Army investigators at Aberdeen have said they plan to interview as many as 1,000 women who were trained at the post since the beginning of 1995.
FDA may mandate pasteurized juice
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Alarmed by another E. coli bacteria outbreak that killed a child and sickened dozens of others in Western states, the government is considering requiring that all apple juices—and possibly other fruit juices—be pasteurized.
Also under debate are measures such as chemically washing fresh produce or forcing manufacturers to adopt programs that prove foods stay pure from harvest to the dinner table.
The deliberations come after at least 49 people, mostly children, were sickened from E. coli in unpasteurized fruit juices. One child died Friday in Denver.
Once thought a threat only in undercooked meat, the virulent E. coli O157 strain now has surfaced repeatedly in apple cider and even in lettuce.
But health experts weren't alarmed until two weeks ago when Odwalla Inc., based in Half Moon Bay, Calif., recalled its gourmet juices that contained tainted applejuice.
"The number of outbreaks are significant in the past year," said John Vanderveen of the Food and Drug Administration.
But there is no doubt this is a different problem, he said.
Just hours after the recall began, he
called a special meeting to warn apple juice makers to increase their quality control efforts while the government decides the next step.
Meanwhile, Vanderveen is advising parents of young children and people with weak immune systems, who are most at risk from food-borne illnesses, to buy only pasteurized juices. Unpasteurized ones, a minority on the market, must be sold cold, so shoppers should check the label when buying any chilled juice, he said.
Many people say unpasteurized juices taste better. But pasteurization, a heating process, kills E. coli, whereas washing fruit with water doesn't.
If the FDA mandates pasteurization, the rule could apply to the all-natural juices sold in supermarkets and perhaps even to the cider that farmers sell at roadside stands.
Although the government is first looking at apple products, they're not the only threat. Salmonella has poisoned Americans who ate alfalfa sprouts, cantaloupes, watermelon and unpasteurized orange juice. Guatemalan raspberries are the prime suspect in last summer's outbreak of the parasite cvclospora.
At least four U.S. outbreaks of E. coli O157, a particularly dangerous strain discovered in 1982, were linked to raw lettuce in the past year.
Zaire supplies slowly arrive
The Associated Press
GOMA, Zaire — After long delays at the Zaire-Rwanda border, 16 trucks and jeeps packed with food and medicine arrived yesterday at the local soccer stadium, where aid workers haggled with rebel leaders about which supplies should go to each of Goma's three hospitals.
At the main hospital just across the road, doctors were desperate for any drugs or medical equipment.
"We're in a sad state," said Patrick Baluba, the hospital's technical director. "More than half my staff has fled into the forests, and I'm having to turn away many patients because I don't have the right drugs to treat them."
Shelling wrecked his last ambulance. He's running out of antibiotics. And wounded Rwandan refugees fleeing a rebel offensive looted his remaining stretchers, wheelchairs and operating tables.
Rebel leader Laurent Kabila agreed this weekend to allow aid agencies into eastern Zaire, where fighting between Tutsi rebels and Zairian troops has uprooted more than 1.1 million Rwandan Hutu refugees, nearly 150,000 Burundian Hutu refugees and an unknown number
of Zairians.
The aid was enough to feed 2,500 people for a week, a fraction of Goma's 80,000 remaining residents, many of whom haven't had access to fresh food for 10 days.
"The longer we wait, the more serious it gets," said Samantha Bolton, representative for Doctors Without Borders, one of 12 groups that managed to get supplies in.
Goma's main hospital has no electricity or running water. Its 40 patients lie in rancid-smelling wards, their dressings grubby, their faces lined with expressions of despair.
"I'm having to turn people away because I have not even anti-malaria or anti-diarrhea drugs," Baluba said. "We'll accept any help we have no now choice but to live from aid."
He told how doctors had tended hundreds of Zairians and Hutu refugees wounded in the fighting. Then, as the rebels approached Goma, even the most seriously wounded patients fled — taking wheelchairs, stretchers, troillets and crutches.
In Kisangani, Zaire's third largest city, Zairian soldiers reportedly were retreating, looting and shooting up this city where some 60,000 Rwandan Hutu refugees were believed to have fled.
Study finds benefits of new heart surgery
The Associated Press
NEW ORLEANS — Coronary bypass patients recover faster, have lower hospital bills and suffer much less pain if doctors fix their hearts through a tiny slit in the chest instead of splitting open the rib cage, the standard approach for the past 30 years, a study found.
done this way within a couple of years.
Surgeons have been experimenting with the new approach, called keyhole surgery, for about two years. Yesterday, they released the first head-to-head comparisons with the traditional operation, which is performed on more than 400,000 Americans annually. Bypass surgery is done to reroute blood around blocked heart arteries.
So far, doctors are using keyhole surgery on patients with single blockages, which make up only about 5 percent of all bypass patients. But the field is moving so quickly that experts expect more complicated operations will be
In a presentation at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Association, James A. Magovorn of Allegheny University of Health Sciences in Pittsburgh, compared 48 patients who had keyhole surgery and 55 who underwent the usual operation.
"It's fair to say patients get better at least twice as fast with this procedure," Magovern said.
Instead of the typical two to three months of recovery, he said, many people feel completely back to normal within two weeks.
Among the differences:
40 percent of the standard surgery patients needed blood transfusions, compared with 8 percent of keyhole patients. Standard surgery patients needed seven days in the hospital, compared with 3 1/2 for keyhole patients.
- Keyhole patients' hospital bills were
40 percent lower.
Another study by James Fonger of Johns Hopkins University found that keyhole surgery costs $10,000, compared with $17,000 for the standard operation.
Typically, doctors make a foot-long cut in the chest, saw through the breastbone and then pry apart the rib cage with a steel retractor, exposing the heart. Then the heart is stopped with medicines, and a machine pumps the blood while doctors sew in the new pieces of artery.
With the new operation, doctors make a 3-inch slice in the fold underneath the left breast. They cut between the ribs in just the right spot so they can see the surface of the heart and remove the artery they need to make the grafts.
The wide chest opening makes recovery slow. Patients often complain of pain even when they laugh or cough.
The operation is the latest example of what doctors call minimally invasive
surgery. This approach first came into widespread use in 1990 after doctors found they could remove gallbladders by operating through tiny slits in the abdomen.
In addition, doctors are using the new approach to replace damaged heart valves, a common operation that also typically has meant splitting the chest.
Renee Hartz, of Illinois Masonic Medical Center in Chicago, said that although the new approach has strong advocates, many surgeons have been highly skeptical.
Nevertheless, at the meeting yesterday, she said, "I get a glimmer that there is some guarded optimism about this in the general surgical community."
Also skeptical are cardiologists who perform angioplasty, a technique that opens up clogged heart arteries by inflating tiny balloons inside the blood vessels and typically leaves only a needle hole.
Cookies sicken children in six Egyptian schools
CAIRO, Egypt — At least 220 children from six schools were hospitalized yesterday for food poisoning after eating the cookies in their school lunches.
Police said warrants were issued for the arrest of the cookie suppliers and food samples were sent to the Health Ministry for testing.
Police officials said 99 students at four primary and secondary schools were hospitalized in Suez, 80 miles east of Cairo.
One hundred girls were hospitalized in the Mediterranean port of Alexandria, 140 miles north of Cairo. Many had their stomachs pumped, and a state of emergency was declared in several Alexandria hospitals.
Twenty-one other students were hospitalized in a Cairo suburb after eating the cookies, which caused vomiting and diarrhea.
Husband and wife killed by tiger as they worked
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Two villagers were killed by a tiger as they worked on their farm, a news agency reported yesterday.
The married couple was not identified. Their bodies were found Sunday near the hamlet of Sungai Gambir in West Sumatra, about 500 miles northwest of Jakarta, the Antara news agency reported. Police Lt. Kliwan Setiadi said the tiger was believed to have attacked the wife from behind. Her husband came to her defense but was killed as well.
The news agency said other villagers blamed logging in the region for the tiger attack, saying the practice was shrinking the habitat for the area's wild animals.
Mosquito-borne fever spreads to Indonesia
Dengue fever reportedly has killed 156 people and infected more than 7,200 others this year in Indonesia, and an outbreak of the mosquito-borne disease has claimed 34 lives in Vietnam's Mekong delta.
SALAMET HARYANO, head of the regional health office, said the government was moving to check dengue fever and to prevent more deaths.
The Vietnamese Health Ministry said that in addition to the 34 deaths, more than 8,000 people in Vietnam had contracted dengue fever this year. The ministry, in a report carried yesterday in the English-language Vietnam News, said most of those who died were children.
Symptoms of dengue fever, which is carried by mosquitoes, include high fever and nose bleeds. In severe cases, patients suffer hemorrhaging of internal organs.
The World Health Organization estimates that in Burma, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand last year, more than 400,000 people contracted dengue fever, and 8,000 died.
Dengue fever is controlled by killing mosquitoes and destroying their breeding places.
—The Associated Press
Domestic LAWRENCE "We StandBehind & Foreign Our Work, and AUTOMOTIVE WE CARE!" Complete Car Care DIAGNOSTICS 842-8665 2858 Four Wheel Dr.
The Etc. Shop
TM
928 Mass.
Downtown
843-0611