County Health Department

The county has received a $40,000 grant from the state Department ofTransportation to combat drunk driving, police officials said.A portion of the grant will be used by the county Sheriff's Department and the Aberdeen and Havre de Grace police departments to put extra patrols on the roads this weekend and next weekend, officials said.The county Health Department, the county Drug and Alcohol Impact Program, the county Highway Safety Committee, Students Against Drunk Drivers and the Drug and Alcohol Resistance Education program also will receive part of the money, officials said.

Schools, county, state will hold meeting on radium in well waterThe Maryland Department of the Environment and the Anne Arundel County Health Department will hold an information session on radium in well water from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday at Chesapeake High School in Pasadena.Staff members from the schools, county Department of Public Works, the state Geological Survey and other experts will talk about recent water quality tests from the wells serving homes and schools in the northern part of the county that have shown elevated levels of radium.

The Howard County Health Department is seeking a state grant for a halfway house that would help women of child-bearing age who are substance abusers and their children who suffer from neglect or abuse.If funded, the program would be the first of its type in the state and could be operating by June, officials said."We hope to include a focus on families where children are abused or neglected," said Dr. Joyce Boyd, county health officer. The intent is a program where "the whole family can get everything they need to be a whole, healthy family."

The county health department plans to end its involvement in a program that trains the chronically mentally ill to find and hold jobs, and turn over management of the service to a private provider by July 1.The Supported Employment Program, run by the mental health division of the county health department, provides job training and work supervision to 55 clients, about half of whom are employed at 18 private businesses in Carroll County.The health department's decision to withdraw from the program reflects an uncertainty about future state funding of the program and a continuing trend toward the privatization of local mental health services, said Janet Neslen, the county health officer.

The Carroll County Health Department has stepped up its efforts to ensure that all young county children are properly immunized.The initiative ties in with a goal set last year by the Clinton administration to immunize 90 percent of all the country's 2-year-olds by 2000.County health department officials updated the county commissioners on their immunization programs at a meeting yesterday.In May, the health department created the position of "immunization outreach nurse" to find county children who have not had all the necessary vaccinations.

About three dozen Annapolis High School students -- concerned they have been exposed to bacterial meningitis that killed their classmate over the weekend -- sought advice from nurses in the school yesterday who were searching for anyone who had close contact with the girl.Cara Margaret Petrini, a junior, died of the disease at 6: 45 a.m. Saturday at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. As health department nurses interviewed students and counselors comforted grieving students, school officials were annoyed and wondering why the health department had not notified them Friday when it became apparent the teen-ager had the disease.

Constance A.M. Miller, who worked for the Baltimore County Health Department as a school nurse for more than two decades, died of respiratory failure Sunday at her home in Sparks. She was 72. She was born Constance Anna Marcella Szymborski in Baltimore and raised on Fait Avenue in Canton. She was a 1950 graduate of Eastern High School and graduated from the old Union Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in 1954. She was an operating room nurse for a year at Children's Hospital and a nurse at what is now Towson University before joining the county Health Department in 1957.

Travis Blake, a senior at Chesapeake High School, was in critical condition last night at North Arundel Hospital in Glen Burnie with bacterial meningitis, hospital officials said.His illness comes two weeks after an Annapolis High School junior died of the disease, but county health department officials say that there is no connection between the two cases."We're dealing with a different strain of the organism," said Frances Phillips, the county's chief health officer.Cara Margaret Petrini, 16, died of the disease April 10.Blake is a center on the school's basketball team.

The Prince George's County Health Department is looking for individuals and animals who may have been in contact with a rabid fox that bit a visitor at Six Flags America in Bowie last Saturday. "Because rabies is a highly transmittable and treatable disease, the Health Department is taking all measures to locate any individuals that may have come in contact with this infected fox or any other infected animal," said health officer Dr. Donald Shell. The health department could not provide inforrmation about the visitor who was bitten.

The Howard County Health Department will open a clinic this month to provide medical evaluations and referrals for HIV-infected patients who have had difficulty finding medical care.A Johns Hopkins physician, a community health nurse and a social worker will staff the clinic, which will operate out of the health department's Columbia office.Funding for the clinic, which will operate on alternate months in Howard and Carroll counties, was made available to Baltimore-area AIDS-care providers through federal grants under the Ryan White Care Act.The act, which distributes money according to the number of AIDS cases in each jurisdiction, is named in memory of Ryan White, an 18-year-old Indianian who died in 1990 after a five-year battle with acquired immune deficiency syndrome.