Colon

TUCSON, Ariz. - From under logs, behind water meters and in the eaves of houses, they're swarming, mad as hell after two years of drought and not going to take it anymore. Africanized "killer" bees are having a coming-out party this spring, making their presence felt from the Mexican border to the Grand Canyon. "Big time," says Justin Schmidt, an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "I'm getting buckets of them." Fire departments in the state's largest cities are being called out a half-dozen times each day to ward off attacks with chemical foam and treat sting victims.

When Richard Colon took over the operations of Mace Electric Co. in 1983, the Baltimore County company had a heap of debt and was on the verge of closing. Colon knew it was a risky venture, but he had a plan to turn the company around. As a manager at the now-defunct H. P. Foley Electric Co., Colon had found subcontractors to help his employer comply with laws that called for greater participation of minority- and women-owned businesses in publicly financed projects. The son of a Colombian mother and a Puerto Rican father, Colon saw a gold mine in government contracts.

Almost a year to the day after Brock Yetso lost his mother, the 24-year-old soccer coach is organizing an event he hopes will break the silence and save others like her. Yetso is the coordinator for Columbia's Cure, a 5K run/walk and 15-mile bicycle ride to be held March 25 in Columbia's Centennial Park. He said the event is more about raising awareness of colon cancer, which took his mother's life, than about raising money. "That's the thing about the disease," Yetso said. "No one really knows how deadly the disease is, and no one really gets tested."

Doracon Contracting Inc. has built itself into a multimillion-dollar company with a long list of projects to its name, including part of the digging at the site of the Ravens football stadium. But as a black-owned business starting out in 1988, the Baltimore company needed help finding jobs. It got that help from state and city laws aimed at increasing minority contracts for public projects. "What you get from these programs is access," said Doracon president and founder Ronald Lipscomb.

An 18-year study of more than 46,000 people has found that a simple but little-used screening test might help prevent people from getting colon cancer. The test, known as fecal occult blood screening, looks for traces of blood in the stool, a possible sign of a cancer or benign polyps that can be precursors to cancer. When these polyps are removed, cancer is prevented. In the study, the colon cancer rate was reduced by as much as 20 percent among people who had the test. The federally financed study, described in today's New England Journal of Medicine, was conducted by Dr. Jack S. Mandel, a vice president of Exponent, a Menlo Park, Calif.

MOISES VILLE, Argentina-This was a most improbable destination for a congregation of 19th-century shtetl Jews, people born to oppression under the Russian czars in a place called Podolia. In 1889, they fled to Argentina on a German ship called the Wesser, 136 families, 824 people, including one rabbi. After much suffering, they built this town in the ocean of grass that is the Argentine pampas. Against that vastness Moses Town is almost lost, like a flea on the hide of an elephant. But it's on the map, small as it is. Some maps, anyway.

IT MADE all the scientific sense in the world and it was an easy fix. But a high-fiber, low-fat diet is no prevention against deadly colon cancer, major medical studies show. The highly touted regimen, promoted by doctors for decades, now equates to another alternative medicine treatment. At least in the results of a four-year U.S. study of men and women who were at high risk for colon cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death. And in a three-year study of at-risk persons who ate extra bran fiber.

The Orioles didn't lose their 2000 opener in the first two innings, but they wasted several chances to break it open then. Five of the nine runners the Orioles left on base in their 4-1 loss to the Indians yesterday were stranded in the first two innings. Cleveland starter Bartolo Colon left his control back in 1999, but the Orioles were unable to deliver the blow that would have given Mike Mussina a bigger lead to work with and enlivened manager Mike Hargrove's debut. "We had some chances early, but Colon made enough good pitches to get out of the jams he was in," B. J. Surhoff said.

Johns Hopkins researchers who devised the first test for hereditary colon cancer say they have developed a technique that will raise the test's accuracy to 100 percent. The technology should also improve testing for other diseases that run in families, including hereditary breast cancer, kidney cancer and cystic fibrosis, doctors say. A report on the findings appears in today's issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Bert Vogelstein, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center, said the finding was born of frustration after his laboratory's discovery in 1995 of the major genes responsible for hereditary colon cancer.

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. is on a hero quest. He doesn't have Nazis chasing him like Indiana Jones, but he is looking to find the lost Ark of the Covenant and recover an even bigger boon, a true sense of Africa's glories past and present."