Treatment

Guilford Pharmaceuticals Inc. said yesterday that its second-quarter net loss fell to $16.8 million as sales of its brain-cancer treatment rose and cost-cutting efforts began to show results. But the Baltimore company, which laid off 60 workers last week and began cutting spending on certain research programs this year, still lost more than analysts had expected. Guilford said the loss amounted to 57 cents a share. Analysts had expected a loss of 53 cents a share, according to the average estimate of five analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial/First Call.

When the delusions take over, he threatens to burn down the house. He quotes the Bible and says that God is telling him to hurt his family. His wife tries to take him to the hospital, but he refuses and drives off in a psychotic rage - and she waits. State standards that govern treatment of the mentally ill have hampered Sheila Fitch's desperate efforts to get help for her husband, who suffers from bipolar disorder. A judge once told her that his threats against the family weren't sufficient to warrant a trip to a hospital.

Sifting through old files and stacks of boxes, staffers from the Department of Veterans Affairs are trying to track down thousands of submariners and pilots who received radiation treatment for ear troubles during World War II. The government wants to tell them they may be at increased risk of cancer.But no one has stepped forward to do the same for civilians who got the treatment as children, even though their risk from the radiation is as much as 10 times higher -- and they may number as many as 2 million.

Human Genome Sciences Inc., the Rockville genomics firm, said yesterday that it has filed for regulatory approval to launch a human clinical trial on its first drug candidate, a treatment to prevent the toxic effects of chemotherapy on bone marrow.If approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the trial would mark a turning point not only for HGS but also for the young but fast-growing genomics industry, analysts said. Analysts expect the trial to get the green light from the FDA."It is a milestone for genomics," said Elizabeth Silverman, a genomics analyst with BancAmerica Robertson Stevens.

Providing antibiotics quickly to people exposed to deadly anthrax spores in a bioterror attack could prevent the vast majority of infections, according to a new study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. If individuals start treatment within six days of exposure to the bacteria, the prevention rate would be about 70 percent, the scientists found. Beginning an antibiotic course even sooner - within three days - would raise the prevention rate to well over 80 percent.

Macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness in the elderly, appears to be yielding to new laser treatments that seal off destructive blood vessels behind the retina. Although doctors caution that the treatments do not offer a cure, they say the therapies have in many cases arrested the downward course of a disease that ordinarily robs people of their sight. Next month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is expected to approve a drug, verteporfin, that is used in concert with a low-powered laser.

An Annapolis man who admitted raping four young children, some of them in his aunt's day care, asked for leniency and forgiveness in Anne Arundel Circuit Court yesterday. Instead, he got a sentence of 40 years. Judge Clayton Greene Jr. told defendant Bruce Dewayne Coates that it was clear he recognized that "what you were doing was wrong because you told the children not to tell anyone." Although he now wants treatment, he could have sought help years ago, the judge said. Coates, 29, pleaded guilty in March to four counts of second-degree rape of four girls - one of them age 2 or younger - over a period of nine years.

Journalist Michael Massing has devoted a decade to investigating America's war on drugs. He has talked with peasants in remote coca-growing regions of Colombia. He has combed through dusty boxes of federal archives. He has documented the heroic struggle of treatment workers at a drop-in center in Spanish Harlem. He has watched a heroin addict shoot up in a New York City tenement.And this is his conclusion:Richard Nixon was right.Now there's a sentence you don't see every day. But Massing argues in "The Fix," his fascinating and unforgiving account of U.S. drug policy, that the Nixon administration's approach in the early 1970s resulted in less crime, fewer overdose deaths and fewer drug-related visits to hospital emergency rooms.

Miriam Landa doesn't sleep anymore. She lies awake thinking of ways to get help and treatment for her struggle with drugs that dates back 18 years. "I feel hopeless," she said. "I have to push myself to take a shower, to eat and to do the normal things people do." She said she has no motivation because she knows what awaits her. At any moment, she could be sent back to jail. Landa, a resident of Havre de Grace, is 30. She has an 8-year-old daughter and is five months pregnant. She is a prescription drug addict and could face her second jail stint on prescription fraud charges.

A Mississippi infant born with HIV has become the first child cured of the deadly virus, leaving hope that the disease can be eliminated in the youngest patients, scientists from Johns Hopkins Children's Center and other institutions said Sunday. The infant, who was born to an HIV-infected mother, was given antiretroviral treatment beginning 30 hours after birth. Scientists believe the early intervention may have proven key to curing the child, who is now 2 1/2 years old. The infant has been determined “functionally cured,” said the scientists, some of whom are from the University of Mississippi Medical Center and the University of Massachusetts Medical School.