OHIO Iraqi baby shows improvement as doctors step up lesion treatment

An Ohio doctor first treated Fatemah Hassan and helped arrange for her U.S. trip.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- An Iraqi baby will get more aggressive treatment on a large neck lesion beginning today, but the Army doctor who first treated 9-month-old Fatemah Hassan says she already looks much better.
Fatemah laughed and played during her public debut Monday. She arrived in Columbus with her mother on a military flight more than three weeks ago, and has been treated at Columbus Children's Hospital with high doses of steroids.
Fatemah was diagnosed with a large hemangioma, a dense group of blood vessels that grows abnormally large, sometimes so large that it could restrict an airway. When her parents brought her to the gates of a U.S. military base in April, Fatemah was blue from lack of oxygen.
"Eight weeks ago when I first saw her, she was a much different child," said Lt. Col. Todd Fredricks, a Marietta doctor who first treated the baby in Iraq. Dr. Fredricks and more than a dozen military officials and legislators helped arrange for the baby to receive free medical care and travel to the United States.
"She's improved. Her color's better," he said. "This is good. We hope it continues to get better."
Next step
Fatemah's primary physician, Dr. Gayle Gordillo, said the mass on her neck is about 10 percent smaller. The next step is a chemotherapy-like treatment that initially will involve daily shots.
"It has shrunk some, but we've hit a plateau, so we need to jump-start it," Dr. Gordillo said Monday.
Fatemah, dressed in a light green outfit with flowers, smiled and laughed during the news conference Monday and played with Dr. Fredricks' 2-year-old son, Shane, beforehand. She playfully stuck her tongue out while her mother, Beyda'a Amir Abdul Jabar, held her.
Dr. Gordillo, director of the Hemangioma and Vascular Malformation Clinic at Children's, said the new course of treatment will take months and involves injecting drugs that keep the mass from growing. The earlier treatments were oral steroids.
"If we need to, we'll add more invasive, complex levels of treatment," she said.
Fatemah has a six-month visa, and Dr. Gordillo said officials haven't started thinking about what would happen if they need to extend that.
The baby and mother, who are part of Iraq's Kurdish ethnic minority, have been staying with a local Kurdish family during the treatment.
Fatemah's father and 3-year-old brother remain in Iraq, where they live in the small town of Mandili on the Iraq-Iran border. Her mother spoke briefly through a translator and said people have treated her well during her stay in Columbus and that she's already seeing improvement in Fatemah.
"I see a lot of difference," she said. "She's active, talkative, energetic."