NEWS Friday, September 8, 2006 - The Michigan Daily - 5 Medicial ethics minefield just got more complicated r President Bush waves to a crowd after arriving on the South Lawn of the White House yesterday in Washington. Bush returned from Atlanta, Ga., where he made remarks on the war on terror. 'Bush focus on terror for midterms carries risk C But approach may be best. bet for GOP to maintain control of Congress WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush is casting the war on global terrorism as the cen- tral issue of the midterm elections. But it's a risky political strategy. The approach carries reminders of failures in Iraq, prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay, warrantless wiretapping at home and Osama bin Laden's endurance abroad. "We learned the lessons of Sept. 11," Bush said yesterday in the latest in a new round of speeches on the subject. "We're working to connect the dots to stop the terrorists from hurting America again." GOP strategists hope the new focus, includ- ing efforts by Republicans in Congress to press for votes on a string of anti-terror initiatives, will burnish Bush's image as commander in chief in responding to the 9/11 attacks and help to divert attention from Iraq. But Democrats were quick to portray the president's recent statements - including his acknowledgment Wednesday of a secret CIA prison system and the movement of 14 high- profile detainees to Guantanamo - as an admission of failure. "Republicans have ignored the lessons of 9/11 and failed to make America as safe as we can and should be," Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said yesterday. "They want to stay the course in the face of failure. We won't. We'll change course in Iraq." With the electorate in a sour and generally anti-incumbent mood, majority-party Republi- cans have little choice but to run on the war against terrorism, suggest activists in both par- ties. Frank Luntz, a GOP pollster and strate- gist who helped orchestrate the "Contract with America" campaign in 1994 that helped Republicans seize control of both House and Senate, sees parallels between then and now -but in reverse since Republicans now control both chambers. "There is a deep desire for change and a consistent widespread rejection of the status quo," he said. Republicans have little choice but to make the war on terrorism their central theme, Luntz said. "They have to, because this is their one area of strength. This goes to the core differ- ence between the two parties and their visions. If you can't communicate a core difference, what can you do?" Democratic pollster Mark Mellman noted that the one-time commanding Republican edge over Democrats on national security "has been dramatically diminished." "The conclusion of a lot of polls is that peo- ple in this country do not feel safer and they feel that George Bush's policies in Iraq and elsewhere have increased the likelihood of ter- rorism against the United States, not decreased it," Mellman said. Six in 10 in a recent AP-Ipsos poll said there will be more terrorism in the United States because the U.S. went to war in Iraq. A CNN poll published earlier this week asked the pub- lic if the war in Iraq was part of the war on terrorism. Fifty-three percent said "no;" 45 percent said "yes." With two months to go before congressional elections that will determine whether Repub- licans can extend their control of Congress, Americans seem concerned over the threat of terrorism but ambivalent over assigning credit - or blame - a lot better shape than where we were before;' Grant Miller, 28, a car sales- man and Democrat said over lunch in Crest- wood, Ky. Fellow Kentuckian Tim Cox, 46, gave the president solid marks for combatting terrorism, which he said was his biggest present concern. "We're doing what we should be," the factory worker said while stopping by the post office in PeeWee Valley, Ky. Vegetative patient's brain shows signs of awareness WASHINGTON (AP) - Advanced brain scanning uncov- ered startling signs of awareness in a woman in a vegetative state, Brit- ish scientists reported yesterday - a finding that complicates one of medicine's ethical minefields. The work is sure to elicit pleas from families desperate to know if loved ones deemed beyond medi- cal help have brain activity that doctors don't suspect. "Can he or she hear and understand me?" is a universal question. It's far too soon to raise hopes, the British researchers and U.S. brain specialists stress. There's no way to know if this 23-year-old woman, brain-damaged over a year ago, will recover, and therefore if her brain activity meant anything medically. Her brain injury may not be typical of patients in a veg- etative state. Scientists don't even agree on whether the woman had some real awareness - she seemed to follow, mentally, certain commands - or if her brain was responding more automatically to speech. "This is just one patient. The result in one patient does not tell us whether any other patient will show similar results, nor whether this result will have any bearing on her," cautioned neuroscientist Adrian Owen of Britain's Medical Research Council. He led the novel brain-scanning experiment, report- ed in the journal Science. The work does raise calls for more research in this difficult-to- study population - because of the tantalizing prospect of one day learning how to predict whose brain is more likely to recover, and maybe even tailoring rehabilitation. "It raises the questions of ethics and experience of these patients, I think, to a new level," said neuro- scientist Joy Hirsch of New York's Columbia University Medical Cen- ter. "It raises the tension about how we treat these patients." But, "making medical deci- sions based on this information at this point in time we say is not appropriate," warned Hirsch, who is conducting similar research and already receives "just heartwrench- ing" requests for help. The woman was injured in a car crash. By the time Owen scanned her brain five months later, she had been pronounced in a vegetative state - physically unresponsive to a battery of tests. A small percent- age of people make some recovery after spending a short period in a vegetative state. Those who don't improve after a longer period are classified as in a "persistent vegetative state," such as the late Terry Schiavo, who became a subject of political con- troversy over the question of taking such patients off life support. An autopsy showed she had irrevers- ible brain damage. Doctors use MRI machines and other scanners to examine struc- tural brain injuries. To see how the brain actually fires - what areas are activated during different pro- cesses - requires more advanced imaging called functional MRI, or fMRI. Owen and colleagues contend their fMRI experiment showed the car-crash victim had some pre- served conscious awareness despite her vegetative state. How could they tell? First, they checked that she could process speech. Upon being told "there was milk and sugar in the coffee," the fMRI showed brain regions react- ing the same in the woman and in healthy volunteers. Then came the big test. Owen told the woman to perform a mental task - to imagine her- self playing tennis and walking through her house. Motor-control regions of her brain lit up like they did in the healthy people he compared with her.