City Health Department

The pigeons may have been cooing at the Patapsco Feed and Supply store, but the patrons certainly weren't. No, these men were serious, and they were angry. That the city Health Department would propose a regulation that could restrict the number of pigeons they're permitted to have to 50, well, that seemed preposterous. Being limited to just 50 of their avian athletes quite simply is not feasible. And besides, pigeon racing is more than just a sport, said Keith Wilkerson, 40, as heads bobbed in agreement all around him. "It's a way of life for us," said Wilkerson emphatically.

The Baltimore City Health Department plans to target Northwest Baltimore neighborhoods with a new mobile lab aimed at combating AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases by offering free testing and information.The van was paid for in part by an $800,000 grant from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to the Ujima Outreach Program, a nonprofit organization founded in 1991 to offer mobile health care to people in communities with a high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases. Among the neighborhoods the van will visit are Forest Park, Rosemont and Walbrook.

Now that the Cuban baseball team has visited Baltimore, the city will move into its next exchange with the Communist nation Sunday by sending doctors to Havana.Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke said yesterday that four area doctors, a city nurse and two hospital administrators will join city Health Commissioner Dr. Peter Beilenson in observing the highly praised Cuban medical system on a three-day trip.Despite being a poor nation, Cuba provides residents universal access to health care. At the top of the list of issues city officials want to explore is the infant mortality rate, considered a critical measure of poverty.

Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, Baltimore's health commissioner, took himself out of the running yesterday for the post of District of Columbia health director. Beilenson, 39, had been recruited for the job and was one of two finalists. He said he lost interest because the process had dragged on for 3 1/2 months."It was putting my family in limbo and causing some disruption in the city health department," Beilenson said. "I just decided that with the chaos in D.C. right now and other factors, I should stay in Baltimore."

Though still burdened with chronic public health problems, Baltimore has made quiet progress over the past several years. Fewer teen-agers are getting pregnant. More babies are surviving. And more children are getting immunized.The numbers, released yesterday by the Baltimore City Health Department, show an upswing in dealing with key health issues."This is not just a one-time occurrence. Routinely, year after year, we're seeing improvements," said Dr. Peter Beilenson, the city health commissioner.

Baltimore housing prosecutors are reviewing about 15 outstanding housing violations -- some of them dating back years -- for possible court action in a widening investigation into properties owned by landlord James M. Stein and his more than 70 corporations.Stein, the 42-year-old silent real estate partner of convicted drug lord George A. Dangerfield Jr., has been named in two civil complaints filed last week by the Department of Housing and Community Development.Three more possible civil cases on three dilapidated properties he owns in the 1000 block of N. Castle St. are being reviewed, said Denise M. Duval, chief of the city's housing enforcement division.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Sixth-graders in several cities are playing a major role in a national effort to wipe out hepatitis B.In a three-year pilot project in Kansas City and Austin, Texas, 10- and 11-year-olds are being vaccinated against the potentially deadly disease that affects the liver.The program has been embraced by six other cities this year, and health officials are preparing to take it nationwide."Hepatitis B is a nasty little virus. The long-term goal is to eliminate it," said Leanne Glenn, a nurse with the Kansas City Health Department.

She is a principal, but Sharman Rowe often found herself checking students' heads for lice, deciding whether a sick child should be sent home, and helping dole out medicine to a line of squirming children with attention deficit disorder."

A proposal for a research trial in which doctors would provide heroin to some Baltimore addicts came under fierce attack yesterday from elected officials as a symbolic step in the wrong direction."

An Aug. 20 editorial incorrectly stated that Metropolitan Eye Associates had a contract with the Baltimore City Health Department. In fact, the contract is with Baltimore Medical System, which receives payments for MEA's services from the city Health Department.The Sun regrets the error.Pub Date: 8/21/96

Baltimore will receive $15.7 million in federal stimulus funds for an initiative to improve energy efficiency at the homes of more than 2,000 low-income city families, Mayor Sheila Dixon announced Monday. With the money, the city expects to weatherize 700 homes each year for the next three years, said Scott Peterson, a spokesman for the mayor. Weatherization involves sealing leaks, updating windows and shoring up insulation to keep houses cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter.

Baltimore has its first three confirmed cases of H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, the city health department said Sunday. All of the three people infected with the virus are adults, but not elderly, according to health officials. One of the people who fell ill is in a local hospital. Health officials have released few details about the infected individuals, citing confidentiality. The three cases are still under investigation, according to Dr. Anne Bailowitz, medical director for Environmental Health and Emergency Programs at the City Health Department.

Baltimore has recorded the lowest rate of tuberculosis since it began keeping track of infection rates nearly two centuries ago, city officials said Tuesday. Last year, the city Health Department reported 32 cases of the disease, for a rate of 5 per 100,000 people. That's down from 47 cases in 2007, a rate of 7.4 per 100,000 people. "Thanks to an aggressive tuberculosis control program and effective engagement of community health care workers, the TB rates have steadily declined," Mayor Sheila Dixon said at a news conference at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, the site of a tuberculosis hospital in the late 1800s, when "consumption" was a top killer.

Newly promoted to police lieutenant, Melvin Russell returned to East Baltimore in the spring of last year and thought he still owned the streets he had left for undercover drug work a decade earlier. Back in his patrol days, all Russell had to do was park his cruiser on a crowded corner and the young men would disperse. But now, the people wouldn't go. He climbed out and talked to the men, and they "questioned my authority," said Russell, now a major who commands the Eastern District station.

One woman was using the wrong type of insulin, causing the 65-year-old to faint one to three times a week. A 47-year-old homeless man drank a liter of vodka a day, and concerned citizens frequently called 911 after seeing him unconscious on the street. And another woman, 88, was just lonely and liked when the emergency responders showed up at her home. They are among a group identified as some of Baltimore's most frequent ambulance callers, 10 men and women representing more than 500 emergency responses in a year.

Fund alternatives to use of violence Congratulations to Mayor Sheila Dixon and the city Health Department for recognizing that violence is a largely preventable public health issue and supporting Operation Safe Streets ("Giving youths safer choices," Aug. 9). I wonder if others noted the irony of the article's placement next to a photo describing the commissioning of a $1.3 billion destroyer ("A harbor nudge," Aug. 9) even as the article outlined the need for an additional $345,000 to keep this proven program alive.

Flanked by chanting volunteers clad in matching white "Safe Streets" T-shirts, Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon led a rally in front of City Hall yesterday to kick off six events planned for the Father's Day weekend in some of the city's most troubled neighborhoods. "The people you see in these T-shirts are not just wearing them for form and fashion," Dixon said. "We can cease violence in these communities." Dixon alluded to some of the week's violence in her remarks, expressing dismay that two men were shot and killed early Wednesday in West Baltimore's Easterwood Park.

A Baltimore woman whose 2-year-old daughter died of a methadone overdose pleaded guilty yesterday to voluntary manslaughter and will be sentenced to a suspended 10-year prison term - and probation that includes mental health treatment. Baltimore Circuit Judge Timothy J. Doory accepted the deal with prosecutors that will spare Vernice Harris, 31, a prison term, instead deciding that the troubled mother needs help and five years of probation. Doory said he would sentence Harris when a space in a mental health treatment facility was found.

Glenn Miles Bosley Sr., a retired city Health Department inspector and lifelong Sparks resident, died Sunday of undetermined causes at Greater Baltimore Medical Center. He was 88. Mr. Bosley was born and raised in Sparks and graduated from Sparks High School in 1937. He earned a bachelor's degree in agriculture from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1941. He worked as a health inspector for the Baltimore City Health Department for 33 years before retiring in 1989. Earlier, he had worked at Black & Decker Corp.

Tracey McCormick wears a white do-rag, a basketball jacket and a grateful expression. Her neighborhood of boarded-up houses, rife with drug addiction and prostitution, is short on warm comforts. But on Thursdays before the sun rises, she can now count on finding a van parked on the same spot off Harford Road, a generator purring to ensure a toasty interior. There, a staff of women greet her with hot chocolate, granola bars and medical referrals. "I look so forward to seeing you folks," said McCormick, 41, sipping from a mug in the van's breakfast nook.