- REUTERS
Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon who suffered a stroke last Wednesday.
JERUSALEM (Reuters):
CHANCES ARE high that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will survive the severe stroke he suffered three days ago but the extent of damage to his brain is not yet known, doctors treating him said yesterday.
Jose Cohen, one of the team monitoring the 77-year-old leader at Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital, rated his prospects of survival as "very high", Israel's Channel 2 television reported.
"I am pretty optimistic about it. We are praying there won't be complications, like catching an infection," Cohen was quoted as saying. But he stressed that Sharon would not be unscathed: "To say that after a severe impact like this one there would not be cognitive problems is just not acknowledging reality."
Earlier, hospital director, Shlomo Mor-Yosef, said Sharon was still critical but stable after emergency surgery on Friday staunched bleeding in his brain. He said the latest brain scan showed slight evidence of improvement in Sharon's condition.
INCAPACITATION POSSIBLE
The medical consensus was that, even if he survived, Sharon - for many, Israel's most dominant figure since founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion -- was unlikely to return to politics.
The death or incapacity of Sharon, who raised peace hopes by pulling Israeli settlers and troops out of Gaza in September to end 38 years of military rule, would create a void in Israeli politics and efforts to forge peace with the Palestinians.
Mor-Yosef said a decision on when to try to awaken Sharon, who was in a medically-induced coma, would be taken early on Sunday and only then would doctors be able to assess how much damage he had suffered in Wednesday's stroke.
"We as human beings are optimistic," he told reporters in a news conference broadcast live throughout the Jewish state. "But I cannot say that the prime minister has come out of danger. There are very slight signs of improvement."
Results of the latest scan stirred cautious optimism in the Israeli media, but outside experts have said the prognosis for Sharon remains bleak given the hemorrhaging that led to his five-hour operation on Friday.
