feedin g 6.fee.993 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Children born with Down syndrome and other disabilities face tough challenges in learning to care for themselves, communicate and socialize, and master schoolwork.

New findings, gleaned from the largest and longest investigation of its kind, offer a rare glimpse at specific ways in which family life either fosters or frustrates these kids’ development.

The study, led by educator Penny Hauser-Cram of Boston College, also reveals some of the challenges faced by parents of these youngsters. As children with Down syndrome or two other disabilities approach adolescence, their parents experience a marked surge in feelings of stress, isolation, and depression related to child-rearing. This increase far outpaces any such trend observed among parents of children with no disability.

Since school services for children with disabilities generally do not include direct support for their parents, “the [unmet] needs of parents may have long-term consequences for their children, especially as they enter adolescence,” Hauser-Cram’s team concludes. The researchers present their results in the current Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.blog.friendster.com

The new study tracked 183 children diagnosed with Down syndrome, motor impairment as evidenced by severe disturbances of muscle tone and coordination, or developmental delay of unknown cause. Children entered the study as infants or 1-year-olds who had been enrolled in any of 29 early-intervention programs in the Northeast. Most of the kids were white and had well-educated parents, at least one of whom was employed. http://louis_j_sheehan_esquire.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog

The researchers used a battery of tests, along with parent and teacher questionnaires, to assess the children’s social, intellectual, and communication skills at five times before age 10. On these occasions, the children’s parents described their emotional responses to child-rearing and family life.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. As has been noted for other youngsters, children with disabilities influence their own mental development, Hauser-Cram’s team says. A child’s motivation to succeed plays a prominent role in this process. For example, the children who at 3 years old gamely persisted in trying to solve a series of problems figuring out how to use simple toys and putting together puzzles also improved the most by age 10 on intellectual tests and in their performance of daily routines, such as dressing and feeding themselves.

This trend particularly characterized children with motor impairment and developmental delay of unknown cause. Perseverance on tasks boosted intellectual growth less effectively in children with Down syndrome, the scientists say. That condition, which often results in mental retardation, may restrict cognitive potential more than the other two disabilities do, they note. http://louis_j_sheehan_esquire.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog

Regardless of their disability, children also improved more in all areas if their mothers consistently interacted with them in a responsive, warm style. Again, the influence was weakest in the cognitive realm among kids with Down syndrome.

This “unprecedented” study may spark a much-needed examination of the developmental effects of special education versus integration, or mainstreaming, into regular school classes for children with various disabilities, comments psychologist Robert M. Hodapp of the University of California, Los Angeles. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

jonestown 5.jon.001001 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .  We expect our killing fields to be marked a certain way, and with at least a certain rhetoric of rectitude. At Jonestown, in Guyana, there are no markers, no memorials noting what took place, no manicured clearings to mark how the site looked 30 years ago, when more than 900 Americans died there in a still hard-to-imagine moment of mass suicide and outright murder. It is an open field bifurcated by a red dirt road, with knee-high bush to the north and, to the south, thick jungle. You don’t even realize you have entered the site until you are already there. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com

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Corbis

The jungle town of Port Kaituma, Guyana.

The wooden billboard that used to hang over the entry, proclaiming “Welcome to Jonestown / Peoples Temple Agricultural Project,” vanished long ago, along with virtually all other signs of Jim Jones and his followers, who died by the lethal ingestion of cyanide-spiked grape Fla-Vor-Aid, forced injection and gunfire. It is as though the memory of the massive loss of life — following the brazen murder of a U.S. congressman who had come to investigate complaints about the compound, three members of the media accompanying him and a commune defector at a nearby airstrip — is still too extreme to be remembered.

The event remains the most famous moment in the history of Guyana, which is roughly the size of Kansas and is the lone English-speaking country on the South American continent. The memory of the massacre is spooked with dark ironies about the country’s 42-year history of independence from the British Commonwealth. The Guyanese government had tried to develop a new and proud independent identity for the country that would serve as a model for postcolonial development — and initially welcomed Jim Jones as a blow to the American forces of imperialism. After the massacre, the country’s leaders opted to absolve themselves of the events, pointing to the Americans as if they had landed from Mars. Today, it isn’t much easier to mourn and memorialize the victims when doing so is an admission of the country’s failed hopes. Marking the tragedy has been no less acute in the U.S. It was only last month, during the 30th anniversary of the deaths, that a marker was erected at a cemetery in Oakland, Calif., to memorialize the 410 Jonestown victims buried there, 60 of them unclaimed.

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Corbis

The Jonestown site, which once featured open fields and groves of trees, is now filled with knee-high brush, thick jungle and a few rusted remains.

The Jonestown site lies far in the bush, an hour’s flight by charter plane from the sleepy coastal capital of Georgetown and another half-hour drive down a bumpy road. “Do you know the bush?” asked my guide there, a slightly built, soft-spoken man from the nearby town of Port Kaituma named Carlton Daniels, as we entered the site of the former compound on the back of his son-in-law’s pick-up. The question wasn’t meant as a conversation starter: A vine he called a “let-me-go” dangled overhead. “It will grab on to you,” he warned.

Mr. Daniels, a semi-retired contractor, is the unlikely Virgil of Jonestown; he has lived in the area all his life and had been postmaster in the 1970s, when he first met the handful of Californian pioneers from the People’s Temple. They began to show up around 1974 after the organization leased 25,000 acres from the Guyanese government. (The bulk of the congregants, an unlikely cohort of African-American seniors, youthful white progressives and a small army of school-age children, would arrive two years later as unflattering reports of financial irregularities and church beatings began to appear in the San Francisco media.) Wading through the knee-high growth, he pointed out what was once a grove of cashew and lime trees, which marked the area around Mr. Jones’s cabin and now struggled to survive against flora more suited to the blazing, nearly equatorial sun.

Mr. Daniels recalled being let in the compound by the Guyanese Defense Forces three days after the massacre to retrieve some fuel containers he had lent to the People’s Temple. “I didn’t want to come back here for a long time after that,” he whispered, as if he were worried he might be overheard. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com

Trailing his son, who was armed with a cutlass against the jungle and the notoriously deadly bushmaster snake, we searched in vain for the remains of Mr. Jones’s piano, its rotting keyboard having been turned up by a party including the minister of tourism a year earlier. We had no more luck in finding any traces of the cage that once held Mr. Muggs, the pet chimpanzee Mr. Jones adopted, who perished alongside the 913 humans.

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Getty Images

On Nov. 18, 1978, he led a mass suicide; that day, bodies covered the Jonestown compound.

“They should have done something to keep the area the way it was,” Mr. Daniels said as his son emerged from a path-clearing reconnaissance job, his upper torso pock-marked with fresh bee stings. Mr. Daniels didn’t elaborate on the thought, but he didn’t need to. He admired the achievement of establishing a commune in such an inhospitable environment and recounted the lovely grove of well-tended fruit trees that once lined the entry. We followed his son about 40 yards into the bush and located the pits where recalcitrant children were kept as punishment (almost a third of the Jonestown victims were kids). Further along, we found what was left of Jonestown: a couple of vehicles turned on their sides; a flatbed truck with a skinny sapling growing through its chassis; and a long metal container that looked like it was once a refrigerator.

Over time there have been intermittent schemes to clear and memorialize the site. Last year, the Guyanese minister of tourism, industry and commerce, Manniram Prashad, visited it to promote his vision of “dark tourism.” A reporter from the Guyana Chronicle cheekily commented that Mr. Prashad “remarked that Jonestown, if reconstructed, can be a major tourist attraction in Guyana.” Rather than getting involved in the “blame game,” Mr. Prashad stated, “we should work to educate our people and allow others who suffered as a result of the loss of loved ones and friends to visit the site if they so wish.” http://Louis-j-sheehan.com

The minister’s desire to equate memorialization and tourism is linked not just to the desperate economic position of Guyana. It also represents the difficult relation between the Guyanese, who live overwhelmingly along a little stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, and the interior, which is home to virtually all of the country’s natural but hard-to-mine wealth in the form of bauxite, timber, gold, diamonds and eco-tourism. The hinterland remains the undeveloped great hope for the coastal Guyanese, whose capital, Georgetown, lies several feet below sea level and grows increasingly threatened by seasonal flooding and rising ocean levels. Roughly 25 miles across the flat plains along the coast, where sugar-cane fields but little else flourish, the jungle begins.

The bush covers 60% of the country, yet it’s home to only 10% of Guyana’s 780,000 residents, most of them descendants of African slaves or South Asian indentured servants. More than 300,000 live in Georgetown. The idea of colonizing the interior, whether it be for its mineral promise or for imagining a new social reality and set of possibilities for future generations, has long enchanted — and frustrated — post-independence Guyanese politicians.

No political leader was more adept at exploiting the idea or realizing its failure than Forbes Burnham, who led the country from independence in 1966 until his death in 1985. His aspirations to create a unique Guyanese path to socialism — through a top-heavy program of massively nationalized industry and agriculture in the interior — aggressively chased off foreign investment.

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Associated Press

Jim Jones, right, was initially welcomed by Guyana’s leader.

Mr. Burnham welcomed not only Jim Jones but other soi-disant radical movements into Guyana, turning the country into an ideological Disneyworld for the charismatic and the disaffected in the late ’70s. After the Jonestown massacre, he hatched a clandestine scheme with a Christian evangelical group associated with Billy Graham’s son Franklin to repopulate the site with anti-Communist Hmong tribesmen exiled from Laos. Like most of Mr. Burnham’s pipe dreams of developing the bush, it failed.

In 1978, Mr. Burnham’s unpopularity was growing and his overconfident austerity economy was failing. Guyanese-style socialist development meant not only nationalization of foreign companies but strict laws against exports, which led to crippling food shortages. The local Georgetown newspapers at the time had many more headlines on garlic and onion smuggling than the murder-suicides at Jonestown.

The disastrous economic effects of Mr. Burnham’s plans long outlasted his political leadership as the country faced energy shortages, racial violence against the South Asians who make up almost half of Guyanese population, crime and political corruption. The 2006 national elections were the first carried out largely without accompanying political violence, and the victorious candidate, President Bharrat Jagdeo, has promoted free-market investment. Still, by 2008, the sole economic category in which Guyana ranked among the highest is outward migration — it has the sixth highest rate per capita of citizens leaving the country world-wide.

Large parts of the interior remain virtually inaccessible, particularly in the northern regions, where Jonestown is located. Though a Chinese timber company has begun operations around Port Kaituma, the tin-shack mining town located about 10 miles from the Jonestown site, the town itself shrank by nearly half with the closing of the Barama Logging Company a decade ago and comprises a more transient population of “pork knockers,” individuals panning for gold. The lack of infrastructure has at least been a boon to the small river port — it’s the only real source of basic supplies imported for the entire region.

For all these reasons, not to mention the public’s stomach for constructing a Potemkin death village, the Jonestown tourism idea is a bit of a tough sale, and there hasn’t been much follow-up to Mr. Prashad’s trial balloon. “That didn’t get very far, did it?” laughed Rupert Roopnaraine, the program director in Georgetown of the Guyana Citizens’ Initiative and former prime minister candidate of the small Working People Alliance party. “The Guyanese, they are superstitious people. They’re not stepping foot back there.”

“When it happened, a lot of us wanted to preserve the site,” Georgetown mayor Hamilton Green says, “but it was impossible.” Mr. Green had been a ranking government official when Mr. Burnham ran the country. “Burnham just said no.” Mr. Green’s wife, Shirley Field-Ridley, who died in 1982, was minister of information in the Burnham cabinet, and as the evening of Nov. 18 unfolded, the country was overwhelmed by what had taken place. “We heard the death toll go from 10, to 100, to 300. What could we do? We only had 30 body bags in the whole country,” Mr. Green says. Like others in Georgetown, he darkly hinted of CIA involvement in Jonestown. There were rumors.

Mr. Roopnaraine says the country suffered from never having a full accounting — not only of what took place at Jonestown in the days after the massacre, when the Guyanese Defense Forces shut down outside access to the site, but also of the Guyanese authorities’ complicity in establishing a state-within-a-state in the hinterlands. He says revisiting the Jonestown massacre would mean revisiting the darkest failures of the country in the years following independence. The scandal helped fuel the popular anger against Mr. Burnham, who used election rigging, harassment and detention of political opponents, and state and paramilitary violence to maintain his autocracy. The insurgency led by Mr. Roopnaraine’s WPA party was effectively silenced by the assassination of its leader, historian Walter Rodney, on a Georgetown street in 1980.

Most of the Guyanese officials who were in power in the 1970s are dead, and questions as to how Mr. Jones’ sect flourished mostly unhindered in the jungle are simply impossible to answer. Mr. Burnham died in 1985; his agriculture minister Dr. Ptolemy Reid, whose portfolio brought him into the most direct contact with Mr. Jones, died four years ago. Neville Annibourne, the ministry of information agent who flew with Rep. Leo Ryan’s entourage to Jonestown and survived the shootings, lives in a suburb near the seawall in Georgetown. After promising information, he immediately requested $200 to start talking.

The point of departure from Port Kaituma to Georgetown is the same little-used dirt airstrip where Rep. Ryan and his entourage came under the fatal fire of the Jonestown killer who pursued them in a small flatbed trailer. There, one signs in with a Guyanese Defense Force official on arrival and departure (drug smuggling into and out across the nearby Venezuelan border remains a fear). In anticipation of a tiny charter plane’s landing, cows were shooed from the runway. A man named Troy came over to sit next to the Guyanese army officer, and began to cite scripture to explain why the spirits of Jonestown remained behind to haunt the land. Mr. Jones, he said, had attempted to make himself God over his kingdom. He quoted Colossians 2: “and having spoiled principalities and powers, he made a shew of them openly, triumphing over them in it.”

From the plane above it’s nearly impossible to make out the Jonestown site from the sky. All that is visible is a ruffled ground of green interrupted occasionally by smoke and, here and there, by a lonely homestead. It remains that way for most of the hour-long flight, until the jungle abruptly comes to an end and the neatly ordered checkerboard squares of the coastal cane fields comes into view. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

CT scans 9.ct.003002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .  When Janice Rodefeld turned 50, her doctor began hounding her to get a colonoscopy. But Ms. Rodefeld was afraid to have the test, which involves snaking a thin tube through the large intestine. It wasn’t until she recently was offered a noninvasive “virtual colonoscopy” that she relented. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz

The test, a type of CT scan in which the patient lies on a table that slides in and out of a tunnel of X-ray detectors, revealed several suspicious growths, called polyps, on the inner wall of Ms. Rodefeld’s colon. To remove them, she underwent a standard colonoscopy later the same day. Some of the polyps turned out to be pre-cancerous. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.biz

Virtual Colonoscopy with Protruding Polyp

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Watch an animation of a virtual colonoscopy showing a 9-mm polyp protruding into the colonic lumen. Animation courtesy of the Radiological Society of America. (Oct. 27)

“I’m glad I finally went ahead because those can turn into full-blown cancer,” says the 58-year-old retiree in Cottage Grove, Wis.

Virtual colonoscopy, formally known as computed tomographic, or CT, colonography, has been available for some time. But more medical centers are gearing up to offer the procedure at a time when new research shows it can be about as effective at finding large polyps as a standard colonoscopy. The cost of the virtual test can run from $500 to $1,500, or less than half the total cost of a standard colonoscopy. But the newer procedure is rarely covered by health insurers for routine cancer screening.

As in Ms. Rodefeld’s case, patients who opt for a virtual colonoscopy may not be able to avoid undergoing the standard procedure as well. That’s because when large polyps are detected during the virtual test, doctors must perform a standard colonoscopy to remove them.

Radiological Society of North America

A patient having a virtual colonoscopy.

Virtual Checkup

More medical centers are offering virtual colonoscopy.

• New research shows the test is about as accurate as a standard colonoscopy.
• Radiologists expect more insurers to start covering the virtual procedure for routine cancer screening.
• Patients undergoing a virtual test will still need a standard colonoscopy if suspicious polyps are found.

When smaller polyps are found, doctors aren’t in agreement about what to do. All such growths are routinely removed during standard colonoscopy. But CT colonography researchers are still figuring out when it’s safe to leave tiny polyps, and how often to repeat the imaging test. The American Cancer Society recommends that a virtual colonoscopy for healthy men and women 50 or older be repeated every five years if no polyps are found. For standard colonoscopy, the group’s recommendation for healthy individuals is every 10 years.

Colon cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., with more than 130,000 new cases diagnosed every year. But studies show that roughly half of all Americans 50 and older aren’t getting colonoscopies, possibly because the procedure is scary, requires sedation and carries a tiny risk of bowel perforation. Physicians are hopeful that the easier, less invasive virtual colonoscopy will significantly boost screening rates.

“It is one of the most important advances in medicine in the past five to 10 years because colon cancer is so common and so preventable” when polyps are detected early and removed, says Robert Halvorsen Jr., professor of radiology at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Medicine.

In CT colonography, the X-ray detectors feed data to a computer program that then creates a three-dimensional model of the abdomen and pelvis. The radiologist’s view simulates a flight through the colon, giving the procedure its nickname of virtual colonoscopy. Both virtual and standard tests usually require patients to fast the night before and drink foul-tasting laxatives to cleanse the bowel, which makes it easier for doctors to see abnormalities in the colon.

Accuracy Was Questioned

Until recently, virtual colonoscopies’ accuracy in detecting polyps has been questioned, partly because results varied widely in tests at different centers. But a large new study conducted at 15 U.S. medical centers by the American College of Radiology Imaging Network, and sponsored by the National Cancer Institute, has convinced more medical professionals of the test’s effectiveness. The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in September, “provide evidence that CT colonography is approximately as successful as standard colonoscopy in the detection of colonic polyps,” says Dr. Halvorsen, one of the study’s co-authors. “It is also much easier for patients, does not require the patient to be sedated, miss a full day of work, or have someone to drive them home,” he says.

Many physicians expect the new study to help push the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which oversees the big government insurance programs, to start covering virtual colonoscopies as soon as next year, a move that private insurers are likely to follow. The agency says its coverage review is set for completion in February.

Some medical centers are getting ready for increased demand. Virtual colonoscopies are generally performed on the same equipment used for other CT scans, which most radiology facilities already have. But centers must acquire specialized computer software to perform CT colonography and train radiologists to read the results. The tests also could provide radiology departments in hospitals and clinics with additional new revenue.

Some medical centers also are rearranging work schedules so that when a radiologist is performing a CT colonography, a gastroenterologist is available in case the patient needs polyps removed; the new study found this occurs among 17% of patients. A good colon-screening service should offer same-day polyp removal because patients shouldn’t be forced to endure the distasteful laxative preparation a second time, says Richard Obregon, a radiologist at Invision Sally Jobe, a radiology group in the Denver area that is expanding its colon-screening service. Such coordinated scheduling is already practiced with other screenings, such as mammography programs that offer immediate diagnostic tests.

Return Visit

After Ms. Rodefeld completed her virtual colonoscopy last month, she was sent home and told to continue fasting until her results were reviewed. A couple hours later, she received a call telling her that polyps had been found and a standard colonoscopy would be needed to remove them. “I said ‘I don’t want to drink that stuff again, so I’ll do it today. Let’s get this over with,'” she recalls.

The CT imaging test, which took just 15 minutes, was at an outpatient facility affiliated with the University of Wisconsin near her home and she was able to drive herself; the 90-minute colonoscopy was at the university hospital in Madison, further away, and her husband drove her. It required sedation and monitoring that aren’t available at the outpatient center. By five o’clock, Ms. Rodefeld was finished and sent home.

“Patients really appreciate that one-stop prep,” says Perry Pickhardt, a researcher and professor who established the university’s program. Wisconsin’s largest health insurers have covered virtual colonoscopy since 2004.

Standard colonoscopies are the most common procedure gastroenterologists perform. CT colonography, meanwhile, is performed by radiologists. That has led to some turf tensions between the two fields. But those tensions are now easing, as most professionals conclude that the new imaging test will increase screening rates and save lives.

Some Risks Seen

Robert S. Sandler, a gastroenterologist and professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, says many people will continue to request a standard colonoscopy. That’s because they will prefer a “definitive” test that can detect and remove polyps at the same time, he says. Also, virtual colonoscopies expose patients to small doses of radiation. This “isn’t a big risk, but it’s not zero,” especially when the CT colonography is repeated every three to five years, he says.

But virtual colonoscopies all but eliminate the most serious risk of a standard colonoscopy: perforation of the bowel. The risk is small — between one and two per thousand tests — but it can cause severe infection and even death.

“I would never have it done again,” says Margery Gould, a 69-year-old retired Los Angeles county employee, who nearly died earlier this year after a series of complications following a botched colonoscopy. Would she have a virtual colonoscopy? “Absolutely,” she says, “because it’s not invasive.”

Write to Rhonda L. Rundle at rhonda.rundle@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications:

The Mayo Clinic is in Rochester, Minn. A chart in this article incorrectly said the clinic is in Rochester, N.Y. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

barcid 5.bar.00200 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .  The Barcid family was a notable family in the ancient city of Carthage; many of its members were fierce enemies of the Roman Republic. The word “Barcid” was coined by scholars when talking about the family in general. The actual surname was Barca or Barcas, which means lightning: see ברק Baraq in Canaanite and Hebrew, برق, barq in Arabic, and similar words in other Semitic languages. It may also mean blessing (Hebrew ברכה brakhah, Arabic بركة barakah). http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET

According to ancient legend, the Barcids were descendants of Queen Dido, the semi-legendary Phoenician founder of Carthage. As her Trojan lover Aeneas abandoned her, Dido killed herself, cursing him and his descendants (the Romans). Modern historians suppose that the family was of humble origin; unfortunately, with the nearly complete destruction of Carthage by the Roman army at the end of the Third Punic War, chances are slim that the true origins of this important family will ever be satisfactorily resolved. http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.NET

During the 3rd century BC, the Barcids were one of the leading families in the ruling oligarchy of Carthage. They seem to have realized that the expansion of the Roman Republic into the Mediterranean Sea threatened the mercantile power of Carthage. Accordingly, they fought in the First Punic War and prepared themselves for the Second Punic War.

The Barcids were the founders of several Carthaginian cities in the Iberian peninsula, some of which still exist today. Mahon and Qart Hadast (more famous by its Latin name: ‘Carthago Nova’ – New Carthage) which currently bears the name of Cartagena.

The known members of this family were:

• Hamilcar Barca (?-228 BC), a Carthaginian general in the First Punic War and in the subsequent Mercenary War. Reputedly, he made his eldest son swear a sacred oath upon an altar of the gods “to never be a friend of Rome.” After the Roman victory, he expanded the colonial possessions in Hispania (modern Spain and Portugal), where he drowned crossing a river.

• His wife; her name is unknown.

• His daugther Salambua.

• His daughter Sapanibal, who was married with Hasdrubal the Fair.

• Hasdrubal the Fair (?-221 BC), Hamilcar’s son-in-law, who followed the latter in his campaign against the governing aristocracy at Carthage at the close of the First Punic War, and in his subsequent career of conquest in Hispania. After Hamilcar’s death (228 BC), Hasdrubal, who succeeded him in the command, extended the newly acquired empire by skillful diplomacy, and consolidated it by laying the foundation of Carthago Nova and establishing it as the capital of the new province. By a treaty with Rome he fixed the Ebro as the boundary between the two powers. He was killed by a Celtic assassin.

• Hannibal (247-182 BC) (“grace of Ba`al” or “mercy of Ba`al”) first-born son of Hamilcar Barca, one of the most famous generals of classical antiquity, and arguably the greatest enemy of the Roman Republic. His most famous victory, the Battle of Cannae is most likely the most studied and famous battle of antiquity. It was written that he taught the Romans, who claimed to be fierce descendants of Mars, the meaning of fear. Roman mothers were said to terrify their children with “Hannibal ad portas!” – “Hannibal is at the gates!”

• Hasdrubal, (?-207 BC) second son of Hamilcar Barca, and younger brother of Hannibal. He defended the Carthaginian cities in Hispania as Hannibal departed to Italy in 218 BC. Leading reinforcements for his brother Hannibal in 207 BC, he was defeated and killed in the decisive Battle of the Metaurus.

• Mago (also spelled Magon) (243 – 203 BC) third son of Hamilcar Barca, was present at most of the battles of his famous brother and played a key role in many of them, commanding the forces that made the “decisive push”.  Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

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