Cholera

Due to an editing error, an article about a speech by Dr. Rita Colwell in some editions of the Sunday Sun incorrectly explained how women in Bangladesh can use the fabric of their saris to prevent cholera, which is spread by organisms in water. Four layers of the fabric are used to filter drinking water.The Sun regrets the errors.Carrying her young son in her arms, the woman is rushing into a hospital. There, doctors look at his shrunken, wrinkled abdomen. They diagnose him with cholera.Rita R. Colwell showed slides of this boy last night as she warned her fellow scientists that environmental factors are also implicated in the spread of the devastating disease, which is traditionally linked with the man-made problem of raw sewage mixing with drinking water.

Maryland, the state that gave the world Babe Ruth, the Star Spangled Banner and hot crabs, appears poised to offer another lasting contribution: revolutionary vaccines targeting some of the world's most vexing diseases.Quietly, but surely, the Baltimore-Washington region has emerged as a hotbed of vaccine research and development.That trend is the result of larger phenomena, say experts like Dr. James B. Kaper, chief of the bacterial genetics division at the University of Maryland's Center for Vaccine Development.

MEXICO CITY -- Cholera, the deadly intestinal disease that swept through Latin America killing thousands four years ago, has cropped up with new force in at least five Mexican states, leaving officials worried about a serious outbreak.The number of cases is still low compared with the Peruvian epidemic in 1991 and 1992, when more than 500,000 people contracted the disease.But Mexican health officials reported 507 cases during one week this month and 1,737 cases for the first five months of the year, triple the number of cases during the same period last year.

Cholera is a severe form of bacterial dysentery that can thrive under conditions of squalor and poor sanitation.In its most severe form, cholera causes profuse watery diarrhea and vomiting. In turn, these symptoms can lead to dehydration, collapse of the circulatory system and death within a few hours of onset.Death rates of 50 percent have been recorded in epidemics.But if fluid loss is promptly corrected intravenously or by drinking oral rehydration solutions, the death rate falls to less than 1 percent.

CHOPTANK RIVER -- Larry Manokey leaned over the starboard side of the small fiberglass boat and grabbed at something floating in the cold water."That's how we find most of them," he said, lifting the sodden carcass to reveal the torn flesh and exposed bones of an oldsquaw duck. "Their breasts are eaten out."Killed by highly infectious avian cholera and then partially eaten by scavengers, ducks are washing ashore by the thousands around the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland and Virginia. The waterfowl die-off appears to be concentrated in the two-state area, but dead ducks have now been recovered as far south as the coast of North Carolina.

The plague of avian cholera that has swept down the Chesapeake Bay this winter reminds us of the perplexing factors that nature periodically employs to regulate the ecosystem.Scientists admit to helplessness in the wake of the rapid contagion that has killed thousands of ducks from Queen Anne's County through Virginia's portion of the bay. Department of Natural Resources workers can do no more than promptly retrieve the carcasses to keep the disease from spreading into the streams, rivers and ponds that could infect other birds, from sparrows to swans.

By early this week, wildlife division personnel in Maryland and Virginia had collected more than 4,000 carcasses of waterfowl dead from the recent outbreak of avian cholera.Dead waterfowl, mainly sea ducks, have been collected from shorelines at Sandy Point and Kent Island as far south as Virginia Beach. The greatest concentrations in Maryland have been in Calvert and St. Mary's counties on the western shore of the Chesapeake Bay and at Tilghman Island and the south shore of the Choptank River in Talbot and Dorchester counties on the Eastern Shore.

EASTON -- Wildlife workers and volunteers in Maryland and Virginia have recovered 21,000 bird carcasses since a die-off from avian cholera among sea ducks was first observed along the Eastern Shore on Feb. 20.Larry Hindman, migratory bird program specialist for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, said that the carcasses recovered are only a fraction of the ducks killed by the disease, caused by the bacterium Pasteurella multocida."

The spring trophy season for striped bass opens next Sunday at 5 a.m. with a new minimum-size limit of 34 inches. Anglers may catch and keep up to three rockfish during May, but the best fishing usually comes in the first two weeks of the month.The reason is that the trophy-size fish, once they have completed the spawn in the tidal interface areas of the Chesapeake Bay tributaries, will leave the bay for the migration north along the Atlantic coast.Given the cold, wet days of March and early April, there was some concern among biologists with the Department of Natural Resources and the Chesapeake Biological Laboratories that the spawn would be late.

Westmoreland, Kan. -- The message is brief, revealing perhaps more about the living than the dead."Here lies an early traveler who lost his life in quest of riches in the west."No name. No date on this grave marker near Vermillion Creek just south of Westmoreland.A good guess, however, would be that the traveler died in 1849. And that would lead to a reasonably accurate surmise that cholera was the killer.The reference to "riches" sounds a little disapproving, maybe even smug. The quest might have been for California gold or it could mean the bounty of Oregon.

Headphones interfere with heart devices NEW ORLEANS: A new study indicates that headphones can interfere with heart devices such as a pacemaker or an implanted defibrillator. "Headphones contain magnets, and some of these magnets are powerful," said the study's leader, Dr. William Maisel, a cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and a consultant to the Food and Drug Administration. "The headphone interaction applies whether or not the headphones are plugged in to the music player and whether or not the music player is on or off."

The movie version of Love in the Time of Cholera doesn't have the drive or the dynamism to be an artistic nightmare. It's more like a dead dream, the kind that leaves nothing more behind in the light of day than a sickly cloud. The director, Mike Newell, and the screenwriter, Ronald Harwood, have taken novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez's sustained flight of grand passion and analyzed the swooping life right out of it. They've thought their way into an adaptation that needed to be intuitive and "felt," like Marquez's mighty marvel of a book.

BEOWULF -- Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins and Ray Winstone star in the Norse legend of the warrior who battles Grendel and his mother. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN -- A hunter stumbles upon dead bodies, a stash of heroin and more than $2 million in cash. MR. MAGORIUM'S WONDER EMPORIUM -- Dustin Hoffman plays the mysterious proprietor of a magic toy shop. JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS -- The story of the former president's book tour to promote Palestine: Peace or Apartheid. LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA -- Lovers wait a half-century to reunite in the adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel of the same name.

The Ghost Map By Steven Johnson In the face of a horrifying epidemic, London physician John Snow posited the then-radical theory that cholera was spread through contaminated water rather than through miasma, or smells in the air. Against considerable resistance from the medical and bureaucratic establishments, Snow persisted and, with hard work and groundbreaking research, helped to bring about a fundamental change in our understanding of disease and...

Next Friday BEOWULF -- (Paramount) Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins and Ray Winstone star in the Norse legend of the warrior who battles Grendel and his mother. Robert Zemeckis directs. DARFUR NOW -- (Warner Independent) Actor Don Cheadle leads an examination of the genocide in Sudan's western region. JIMMY CARTER MAN FROM PLAINS -- (Sony Classics) Director Jonathan Demme chronicles the former president's travels as Carter promotes his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA -- (New Line Cinema)

baghdad -- Five cases of cholera have been reported among children in Iraq in the past three weeks, a worrying sign as temperatures rise and the war leaves sewage and sanitation systems a shambles. All of the cases were among children younger than 12 in the southern city of Najaf, and all were reported by medical officials on alert for signs of the potentially lethal ailment, Claire Hajaj of UNICEF said yesterday. Cholera, which is spread through bacteria in contaminated water, is easily treatable but can cause rapid dehydration and death if not treated.

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic - and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World Steven Johnson Riverhead Books / 302 pages / $26.95 If every great city resembles a living organism, then mid-19th century London was an ungainly and careless youthful giant with appalling personal habits. As Steven Johnson makes nauseatingly clear in the grim and gripping early pages of The Ghost Map, the stench of human excrement was everywhere. Forget about sanitary engineering and the modern science of waste management.

Tim Mullady peers into a microscope in a darkened room at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater. He is counting cells from a sample of ballast water taken from a ship, looking for Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that cause human cholera -- and sometimes is discharged from that ballast into local waters along with scores of other "foreign" organisms. Mullady is part of the Marine Invasion Research Laboratory, which provides information from the forefront of the research community to the Coast Guard and Congress.

Tim Mullady peers into a microscope in a darkened room at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater. He is counting cells from a sample of ballast water taken from a ship, looking for vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes human cholera - and sometimes is discharged from that ballast into local waters along with scores of other "foreign" organisms. Mullady is part of the National Marine Invasion Research Program, which provides the Coast Guard and Congress with information from the forefront of the research community on this issue.

Like any good horror story, the northern snakehead saga already has a Maryland sequel in the pipeline: the Vietnamese nuclear worm. Hot-pink and up to 5 feet long, the worms have quietly made their way from the brackish waters of Southeast Asian mangrove forests to bait and tackle shops around the Chesapeake Bay. For anglers out to catch striped bass and white perch, the worms are everything they could want in a bait - fat, cheap and juicy, hardy in...