CHECKUP: SOME PATIENTS ARE STILL ABUSING ANTIBIOTICS.

Byline: - Staff and Wire Reports

A new study from UCLA shows educational efforts advocating a decrease in the use of antibiotics for the common cold have failed to reach the Latino and Asian communities. The study surveyed 570 Los Angeles-area parents who took their children to the doctor for respiratory illnesses between October 2000 and June 2001.

Seventy percent of parents said antibiotics were either definitely or probably necessary to treat their child's illness. Latino parents were 2.5 times more likely and Asian parents 3.5 times more likely than white parents to expect antibiotics.

Despite warnings from health campaigns that overuse of antibiotics can lead to antibiotic-resistant infections, doctors continued to prescribe them if they felt pressure from parents, the study found. Doctors who perceived that parents expected antibiotics were 22 percent more likely to prescribe them regardless of the results of the physical examination.

The findings will be presented today at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting in Baltimore.

SHOWING ITS GOOD SIDE: A recent study suggests that, properly administered, the same virus that causes the common cold may also be able to shrink tumors.

The researchers - from Stanford University, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston - presented their findings at a recent meeting of the Society of Cardiovascular and Interventional Radiology in Baltimore.

The researchers used a modified form of the adenovirus, a common cold virus, on 33 patients with gastrointestinal cancer that had spread to the liver. The virus was introduced by catheter into an artery that leads to the liver, and the primary goal of the experiment was to determine whether the procedure was safe.

Apart from causing a mild flu in most of the patients, the technique appears to pose no risk, the researchers reported. It also appears to have some effect: The patients' tumors shrank, and those receiving the highest dosages of the virus lived longer.

HEALING THE DAMAGE: A new study of hepatitis C suggests that available treatments may reverse some of the liver damage from the disease, at least for younger patients.

Four million Americans are thought to be infected with the virus that causes hepatitis C, and the disease is the leading reason for liver transplants.

The study reviewed data from 3,000 patients in four clinical trials. The researchers, led by Dr. Thierry Poynard of the University of Paris, found that cirrhosis - tissue death and scarring - had been reduced for half the 153 patients whose liver damage was confirmed by biopsies before the study began.

The drug treatment - a combination of pegylated interferon alfa-2b