Statesman Journal from Salem, Oregon • 1

TODAY STQnH IHLP3 SOI IDOL CUHD THUAIXY: GSU SI-CC'ID if is safs nzsTAunArns What do county health officials look for? And what are they finding in Salem? 1CLife But som North Saem residents say signs aimed at Chemawa students are discriminatdry. 1B Local Les Gutches wins the 1 77-pound championship; Babak Mohammadi is second at 134. 1 Sports Partly cloudy HIGH: BLOW: 55 45 Details: Back Page On Tnri) I I Salem, Oregon $1.50 Sunday, March 19, 1995y JL7(c Wfi MM Randy Miller: Party is barely moving Brady Adams: Approach is responsible ing to the Chicago Bulls after a 17-month absence. Fans in Chicago and across the country had a collective reply: Bring on the game. "The Chicago Bulls are the next NBA champions," said Art LeBeauw at the annual downtown St.

Patrick's Day Parade. "It took a lot of Irish luck to get him back." Jordan said hell return to the lineup today against the Indiana Pacers. Chuck Person, a longtime trash-talking rival in Indiana Fans are ecstatic about the star's return to the Bulls' roster for today's game in Indiana. The Associated Press CHICAGO It was a win in the lottery, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and the discovery of a lost treasure, all rolled into one. After days of nerve-wracking, nail-biting waiting, Michael Jordan said Saturday he's return- now toiling for San Antonio in the Western Conference, said, "I'm a Jordan fan, and I hope he gets to the finals.

He's the best already this year, even though he hasn't played a game." Besides providing a much-needed spark to what was shaping up as a ho-hum playoff race, Jordan also should lift the Bulls. Chicago will enter today's game with a 34-31 record and in the sixth position in the Eastern Conference. The game starts at 9 a.m. PST on NBC. With No.

23 back in business, sporting goods stores were scrambling to meet the expected rush for jerseys, jackets and caps. In Indianapolis, 32 of the 34 Jordan jerseys the Indianapolis Sports Store had in stock were sold by mid-afternoon, said cashier Chandra Templeton. Hundreds of fans began gathering early Saturday at the Bulls practice facility in suburban Deerfield after word leaked out of Jordan's imminent return. Chicagoans weren't the only people giddy with the inherent potential of Jordan's return. A statement issued by Sen.

Bob Dole, read in part: "I'm happy to see Michael Jordan headed back to the court. But down the road when he finally decides to look for a new job, maybe he should think about the U.S. Senate. The way he drives to the basket, he might be able to get things moving there, too." WAIT IS OVER: Jordan simply says, "I'm back." Page 1 GOP's crusade slows in atseots or bi fight. got to due 1 97 ft, Choices about the end of life prove wrenching for families and doctors.

By Diane Dietz The Statesman Journal Era Hood was a persuasive man, able to carry people along on the sound of his voice, but when he was dying it took him a solid month to convince doctors to unplug his i i i 3 I i A I i t. i i- II 1.UMIMIIMII1..II .11. II 4 it respirator and let him go. But he tried and tried, and by one clear blue morning in February, it looked as if he had succeeded. The hospital had scheduled him for disconnection at Oregon By David Steves The Statesman Journal The champagne buzz of November's election victories is long gone for legislative Republicans.

The mild intoxication that came with the takeover of both houses of the Legislature has given way to the sobering mid-session task of turning campaign rhetoric into legislative action. Republicans stormed Salem in January with an ambitious agenda that aimed to please their hard-core constituents. But many of their top issues loosening land-use laws, relaxing recycling standards, bolstering property owners' rights and helping businesses fend off lawsuits have stalled or been watered down to satisfy more moderate lawmakers. For legislative Democrats and lobbyists fighting their proposals, it's a far cry from the lightning pace they'd complained about when the session was getting under way. "I think the runaway train that we saw at the beginning of the session has been, if not derailed, at least slowed down," said Chuck Tauman, lobbyist for the Oregon Trial Lawyers Association and a chief foe of the lawsuit reform bills.

Sen. Randy Miller, R-Lake Oswego, agreed, saying, "I would submit that, indeed, we are barely moving." Senate Majority Leader Brady Adams, R-Grants Pass, said Republicans aren't hung up now, any more than they were blazing through the process earlier this session. Theyre simply trying to be responsible in their new position of leadership. "I think people had misper-ceived us. They were looking for a slash-and-burn radical approach," he said.

"What we're doing is acting in a deliberate, considered manner." Please see GOP, Page 2A CONGRESS: Republicans struggle in Washington. Page 2A Ern Hood: Wanted to be off respirator ill About the series In November, Oregon voters approved Measure 16, an initiative that gave doctors the right to help the terminally ill commit suicide. A federal judge has put a temporary halt to the measure, but what he couldn't stop was the ongoing practice of people making decisions to end their own life or the life of a loved one. They're simply doing it without a doctor writing the fatal prescription. TODAY: By the time he had lost his voice, the use of his legs and the ability to breathe on his own, Em Hood wanted to die.

Now all he had to do was convince his family and his doctors to help him. MONDAY: Patients have been fighting to gain control over major medical decisions for decades. Remember Karen Ann Quin-lan? TUESDAY: A nurse, hospital administrator, pharmacist and other medical professionals discuss what they would do if doctor-assisted suicide becomes legal. Jay RelterStatesman Journal DECISIONS: Laurel Hood helped her father convince hospital officials that he wanted to stop treaments. Full page inside7 A DECISIONS: What do you think about assisted suicide? 10 a.m.

and his family seemed prepared. His daughter, Laurel, had taken down his instructions to spread some ashes over the places he had been happy his home, his farm and Rogue River. His doctors finished calculating how much morphine would calm his gasping without killing him outright, factoring in a very good glass of wine. A guitarist played some of Hood's own compositions. An ex-wife arrived from Texas to slip her family crucifix into his hand.

His grandson, age 4, flew an imaginary airplane over his bed. By 10 a.m., a dozen people had gathered in the hospital room all but the doctor who was to turn off the respirator. The doctor had disappeared, left the hospital, abandoning the job to an intern who was unprepared to act. And so it looked like Ern Hood a loved one alive. Most people die in hospitals, where care has become so sophisticated that the process of death has become a series of choices about which treatments to administer and which to withhold.

For each dramatic choice like Hood's, there are hundreds of smaller decisions about whether to continue heart drugs or when to stop antibiotics. Opponents of Oregon's doctor-assisted suicide law maintain that doctors and families can't be trusted to make ethical decisions about when to help a dying patient go. But, in truth, doctors and families are already making those decisions. The law recognizes that a person has the greatest authority over what happens to their body. But too often patients are in a coma or otherwise unable to speak; doctors and patients loved ones are left to guess what the patient would want.

Only one fifth of people get around to making out a living will. Moreover, family members are notoriously inaccurate in determining a patient's wishes. Please see Die, Page 7A would live a while longer, whether he wanted to or not. How far do we go? Most families will never face a life or death decision quite as stark as that of Ern Hood and his family, because there was no question that without a respirator Hood would die. But most families eventually will face the question of how far to go to keep Not much will happen to Americans, Iraqi says Expanding medical arsenal defeating childhood diseases Beginning Monday OUTLOOK What's on the horizon for industry in Salem? Find out in the first of five special sections in the Statesman Journal this week.

Also look for the Business Leader of the Year, plus tourism and health news. HEALTH The Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq The No. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's regime acknowledged Saturday that Iraq was holding two Ameri Pill Ml. JAJtl Index Ann Landers. 3C 1-6E Classified 1-1 6F Comics cans but said ''nothing much" will happen to them.

The two men, who Defense Secretary William Perry said were servicing aircraft in Kuwait, were arrested Mondav they would be put on trial. He also hinted at possible links to Baghdad's drive to get the U.N. Security Council to lift crippling trade sanctions imposed after Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990. "I think those two, you're not supposed to give them more attention than the 20 million Iraqis that the American administration is working to kill them by starving them to death," he said. The United States has resisted easing the oil embargo, which has wrecked Iraq's economy.

The two Americans were arrested after they crossed into Iraq from Kuwait to visit friends in a Danish engineering unit, U.N. officials said. Perry said he hoped the matter would be settled by the time he leaves Saudi Arabia today. U.S. officials declined to name the men, citing privacy laws.

Kathy Daliberti of Jacksonville, said that one of the men is her husband, David. "I'm just about at my wit's end, not knowing if he's all right," she said. The Associated Press WASHINGTON One by one, the diseases that imperiled children in America two generations ago are falling. Smallpox has disappeared. Polio is almost gone.

Rare are diphtheria, cholera and tetanus. Measles, both German and red, are under control, as are mumps and whooping cough. And now chicken pox is on the run. The Food and Drug Administration last week approved a new chicken pox vaccine, adding it to the numerous shots that ward off childhood diseases. Chicken pox infected 134,722 Americans in 1993, the last year for which figures are available.

About 9,000 were hospitalized, and 90 died of the illness. Those numbers will fall, doctors say, when the use of a vaccine called Varivax becomes common. Such advances in the last half-century have cleared from the American landscape diseases that once made childhood a perilous time. The 1940s was an era Measles, mumps and rubella are under control, and the childhood DPT shots are reining in diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis. The revolution in antibiotics since the 1940s has had an effect, too.

Many infections that once caused serious injury or death now are cleared with modern drugs. All of this has significantly improved childhood survival. In 1940, for example, the death rate for children ages 1 to 4 was 289.6 per 100,000. In 1993, the death rate was 43.6 per 100,000. Death now comes in a different guise.

In 1940, infectious disease ranked high as the most frequent cause of childhood death. In the 1990s, accidents, homicides and suicides are the top killers of American kids. David Dalibertl: Being detained in Iraq, wife says News tips: Crossword 399-6677 Editorials 10, 11A TPa98 lST.mb advertising: Lotteries 2B 399-6602 Movies 2C Classified: Nafon 399-6789 bjtuaries Sports 1-8D For home 2-4E delivery: Weather 12A 333-6622 Part of the Statesman Journal is printed on recycled paper. Vol. 143, No.

360. 24 sections, 358 pages. A Gannett newspaper. 1995 The Associated Press ADVANCE: Dr. Jo White (right) and Dr.

R. Gordon Douglas of Merck Co. Inc. introduce a chicken pox vaccine. when epidemics of mumps, measles, whooping cough and polio regularly swept through neighborhoods, sometimes killing or crippling children.

Smallpox has been wiped out, worldwide. Polio has disappeared from the Western Hemisphere. night by Iraqi police. Their whereabouts and condition were unknown. Iraqi Vice President Taha Yas-sin Ramadan said: "The borders must have some respect.

Surely it will be taken into consideration in dealing with any person that does not respect the laws of the country." Ramadan did not say whether.