 Initial results from a battery of tests on Yasser Arafat found no signs Saturday of leukemia, Palestinian officials said, but blood doctors were still probing the cause of the ailing Palestinian leader's dramatic deterioration in health. "Arafat does not have leukemia," Mohammed Rashid, a close Arafat aide, said Saturday night. "It's been ruled out." Results from additional tests to determine what was wrong were due Wednesday, he said.
Rashid, speaking to reporters at a Paris hotel where a contingent of Palestinian officials was staying, said Arafat was eating again Saturday and able to keep food down. The comments from Rashid, Arafat's financial adviser, were more definitive than those hours earlier from Leila Shahid, the Palestinian envoy to France. Shahid, speaking in several languages to reporters outside the Percy military training hospital southwest of Paris: "The doctors exclude, already from what he has done in terms of exams, any possibility of leukemia. I repeat: the doctors exclude for the time being any possibility of leukemia." In Arabic, Shahid said other tests also have "not shown any sign of other dangerous disease." But "there are other possibilities and we are still exploring," she added in English.
Earlier, a Palestinian official who spoke on condition of anonymity had said there was a strong possibility Arafat was suffering from the bone and blood cancer and that a team of French physicians specializing in the disorder examined the Palestinian leader for a second day Saturday. In an interview with Palestinian Satellite Channel television, Shahid said Arafat spent half the day undergoing medical treatment and spoke by phone to his young daughter, Zahwa, in Tunisia. "So far the test results are good," Shahid said. "The president is relaxing now, and he hopes he will return to take up his responsibilities soon."
| I wonder if they'll make the diagnosis of Alzheimer's while he's there? In my non-professional but fairly informed opinion, he's shown lots of the signs of that. The lack of recognition of people he's known for years certainly fits, as do his occasional temper tantrums. |
| Other possibilities for Yasser: myelodysplastic syndrome, a pre-leukemia condition; lymphoma; gastric cancer with liver metastases (should have nailed that by now); pancreatic cancer (ditto); or another blood dyscrasia. |
| But wouldn't the liver cancer have turned him bright yellow? Or would that be still to come? |
| They turn yellow (jaundice) eventually but you can pack away a fair bit of tumor in the liver before that happens. Gastric or pancreatic cancer should have been diagnosed by now assuming competent docs and a decent CT scanner. |
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