Cancer Center

The courage that helped Lance Armstrong beat cancer and win cycling's most prestigious race inspired hundreds of people yesterday at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, where he introduced new cancer-fighting technology that uses precise beams of radiation to target tumors. "I never would have won the Tour de France without the illness," Armstrong said at the event, during which the hospital also announced it would name its cancer center after Geaton A. DeCesaris Jr., 47, of Lothian and his wife, JoAnne, in honor of their $3 million contribution.

After nearly 20 years of tantalizing hints that vitamins or other food substances might prevent cancer, researchers say they have finally proved that this strategy works.By giving people a form of a vitamin, they prevented one type of cancer.In a study being published today, researchers at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas in Houston report that high doses of a derivative of vitamin A, marketed as the acne drug Accutane, prevent lung, throat and mouth cancers in people who are at high risk of developing them.

Jack C. Zoppo, a Baltimore City Fire Department lieutenant honored several times for rescues during a 19-year career, died of kidney cancer Saturday at his home in Stewartstown, Pa. The former Parkville resident was 45. "He was a man of courage in all aspects of his life," Fire Chief William J. Goodwin Jr. said yesterday. "He was a good leader and took care of the guys he worked with, his family and his friends. He also took his life and his job very seriously." Born in Baltimore and raised in Parkville, he graduated from Parkville High School in 1976 and served in the Air Force as a fire protection specialist.

Office of Planning to close today so it can move The county Office of Planning will be closed from noon today until Monday morning to enable it to move to new quarters. The office will be located in Suite 101 of the Jefferson Building, 105 W. Chesapeake Ave. in Towson. The office's phone numbers will remain the same. Because of the move, the Planning Board has canceled a meeting scheduled for Thursday. The next board meeting will be June 19 in Hearing Room 102 of the Jefferson Building.

There was a moment of silence in the Overlea High School auditorium as Barbara Samuelson told 150 young women how she discovered cancer in her right breast.A mother of two young children, Mrs. Samuelson was 32 when she felt a suspicious breast lump while taking a shower. She eventually lost both breasts after her cancer was diagnosed, but the disease has not recurred. She will celebrate her 53rd birthday this month."Every cancer is different," she told the girls. "Every case is different.

Marlene Greenebaum remembers a time when she actually referred to it euphemistically as the C-word. But that was a lifetime ago, before the bilateral mastectomy in the summer of 1990 and before the subsequent chemotherapy.Having faced cancer and won, her name now is very boldly and publicly linked with the very same word from which she once shied away in private conversation with friends.A glass and chrome elevator opens on the ninth floor of the Gudelsky Building at the University of Maryland Medical System to reveal gleaming brass letters that proclaim this space as the Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center.

In The Region W.R. Grace earnings triple in 2nd quarter to $21.3 million W.R. Grace & Co. reported yesterday that its second-quarter net income more than tripled, to $21.3 million, or 32 cents per share, from $6.5 million, or 10 cents per share, in the second quarter of 2003. The Columbia-based chemical company said sales rose 13.7 percent, to $572.4 million, from $503.4 million in the year-earlier period because of higher volumes and improved product mix, as well as favorable currency translation and acquisitions.

SAN ANTONIO -- Significantly fewer American women were diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003, and a drastic drop in the use of hormone therapy is the most likely reason, researchers reported yesterday. Breast cancer diagnoses dropped by 7 percent overall and by about 15 percent in women over 50, the group most likely to have been taking hormone therapy before a well-publicized federal warning scared millions into stopping in 2002. It won't be certain that the decreases are not an aberration until April, when figures for 2004 are released.

Howard County General Hospital unveiled yesterday its version of a trend in health care -- providing rooms that resemble those in hotels, if not those in patients' homes.The hospital used a homelike motif -- hardwood floors, wall-paper and paintings -- in renovating a 29-bed nursing unit. The $2.5 million, 13,000-square-foot 4 South Nursing Unit will accommodate its first patients -- primarily those with cancer -- on Tuesday."We want to offer a more comfortable atmosphere so patients will be less traumatized by hospitalization," said Judy Siegelman, administrative coordinator for the unit.

AT THE end of another miserable rainy day, at the end of a half-century's work in cancer and psychiatry, there stood a beaming Dr. Nathan Schnaper last week, with his familiar red bow tie that could be seen halfway across downtown, in the midst of his very own legend. He stood there at the University of Maryland Medical Center with his colleagues and his family all cheering him, and Schnaper tried to wave them off and tell them they were making too much of him. But they weren't. They named a new internship program in his honor, for students interested in medical research.