Disease

Although more than 30,000 people in the U.S. are infected with Lyme disease each year, Dr. Robert Edelman says most infections can be avoided or, if not, then treated. "Even [with] a tick that has been feeding on you for one day, your chance of getting Lyme disease is remote, because it takes two to three days of feeding to infect people," he says. "Besides, four out of five ticks are not infected." Some ticks are difficult to see. When I'm checking my body, what areas should I pay closest attention to?

Q. I've noticed that a lot of heirloom tomato varieties are showing up in my seed catalogs. They promise better flavor, but are they worth it if they produce less? And do the heirlooms get more diseases?A. Many of the tried-and-true heirloom cultivars of years past are indeed making a comeback. In many cases, the yields between old varieties and modern hybrids are comparable. As for the disease issue, fusarium wilt is a significant disease to which most hybrids are resistant and most old cultivars are susceptible.

Pledging to highlight the persistent epidemic of AIDS among African-Americans, the NAACP and several corporations will release a series of videos today on the disease's causes, preventions and treatments, NAACP officials said yesterday.The announcement of the release, which is expected at a news conference in Washington this morning, comes as the Baltimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People begins its regularly scheduled quarterly board meeting at a Baltimore County hotel.

Pledging to highlight the persistent epidemic of AIDS among African-Americans, the NAACP and several corporations will release a series of videos today on the disease's causes, preventions and treatments, NAACP officials said yesterday.The announcement of the release, which is expected at a news conference in Washington this morning, comes as the Baltimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People begins its regularly scheduled quarterly board meeting at a Baltimore County hotel.

Q. My English ivy covers most of my small front yard. I noticed that some of the leaves are developing brown patches and dying. Is this a disease that will spread and kill the whole patch?A. Volutella, a common fungal disease, is the most likely culprit. It will continue to spread but can be controlled if you vigorously rake out dead leaves and stems (to remove disease spores).Thinning the bed will help improve air circulation and reduce disease incidence. You can also apply a copper fungicide early in the spring when new growth emerges.

RABIES IS MAKING a comeback. Last year, Anne Arundel County's Animal Control Department handled 97 confirmed rabies cases, more than any other Maryland jurisdiction.The number was twice as many as in 1995, which was double the number for 1994. Although most of the rabid animals handled by animal control were wild, the mushrooming number of cases reinforces the wisdom of having dogs and cats vaccinated.Rabies is an infectious disease that affects the central nervous system of mammals. The disease is invariably fatal if untreated.

The mantra at Poly-Seal Corp. yesterday was "spick-and-span" as company officials and the state health department reassured returning workers that the plant is safe, even as a new case of Legionnaires' disease was confirmed Tuesday.Five Poly-Seal employees have contracted the disease, including 51-year-old Joenell Fisher, who died Oct. 1. Another two workers caught pneumonia, which is often the first stage of the disease.The entire plant in Holabird Business Park in Baltimore had been closed for remediation since Saturday.

IN THIS country, major medical news usually consists of high-technology advances in treating big killers like cancer or heart disease. In many parts of the world, it takes far less sophistication to have lifesaving results."

Gene hunters have moved a step closer to finding the mutation responsible for a rare inherited illness that has crippled scores of people in a single Maryland family, the descendants of Thomas Mattingly, an English colonist who died in St. Mary's County in 1664.In the current issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, a team of scientists say they have narrowed their search to one tip of chromosome No. 9, one of the 23 that contain the human genetic blueprint.In doing so, they've winnowed the number of suspect genes from the 100,000 that comprise the human genome to perhaps 100. Pinpointing the gene could one day yield therapies for the Mattingly family illness, researchers said yesterday.

Lyme disease is one of the most insidious illnesses around.It gets you while you're doing something pleasant -- like walking in the woods on a summer day.The tick that carries it is so tiny -- the size of the period at the end of this sentence -- that you can barely see it. And seeing it is important, because if you pick it off with tweezers within 24 to 48 hours, chances are you won't get sick.Finally, the circular red rash that develops around the tick bite is easy to miss. Yet if you ignore it, or the fever, chills, headache and fatigue that will follow in the next few weeks, you may miss your best chance to stop the disease before it turns chronic -- and causes trouble for years.

Strengthening its position as a global center in the fight against malaria, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is one of two Baltimore institutions tapped for a five-year, $100 million project to help combat the mosquito-borne disease. The school will work with Catholic Relief Services to use a grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to procure and promote long-lasting, insecticide-treated bed nets in countries with malaria, a disease that sickens more than 650 million people a year.

Kent Bugg came home from work one day a couple of years ago to learn that his wife, Dorothy Frohder, had abruptly retired from her job as a middle school guidance counselor. The woman with four degrees realized that she just couldn't do the work anymore. She could no longer use her computer properly. There were other hints of something amiss. She had stopped keeping track of the money she was spending. She couldn't find the words for simple things. On May 19, 2007, Frohder learned that what her husband had been attributing at times to a thyroid problem, at others to just plain aging, was really Alzheimer's disease.

Faced with the highest number of measles cases in a dozen years, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are warning parents to vaccinate their children to ward off further outbreaks. From January through July, 131 measles cases have been identified in 15 states and the District of Columbia - the most since 1996, the CDC announced yesterday. About half of the cases involve children whose parents refused to vaccinate them for religious or philosophical reasons. No cases have been detected in Maryland.

DENVER -- The Atlanta tuberculosis patient whose trans-Atlantic voyage in May sparked an international public health incident has a less severe form of the disease than was initially diagnosed, health officials said yesterday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in late May that Andrew Speaker had the most dangerous form of the illness, known as extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, and had left the U.S. against the advice of medical authorities. The CDC asked the Department of Homeland Security to bar him from flying back into the U.S. and, for the first time in 44 years, used its quarantine power to order him into isolation should he return.

Although more than 30,000 people in the U.S. are infected with Lyme disease each year, Dr. Robert Edelman says most infections can be avoided or, if not, then treated. "Even [with] a tick that has been feeding on you for one day, your chance of getting Lyme disease is remote, because it takes two to three days of feeding to infect people," he says. "Besides, four out of five ticks are not infected." Some ticks are difficult to see. When I'm checking my body, what areas should I pay closest attention to?

Doctors first gave Karen Banfield Evans a year of chemotherapy, even though she doesn't have cancer. Then, they switched her to a drug that prevents organ rejection, though she has never had a transplant. Add into the mix several blood pressure reducers, a steroid, various nutritional supplements along with a multivitamin, and the count of pills Evans takes per day comes up to 10 - none of which was designed to treat her disease. Evans has lupus, an often debilitating illness in which the immune system attacks the body, destroying organs, tissue, joints and quality of life.

Forecasts of snow may send people running to supermarkets for bread and toilet paper. But some scientists want their predictions to provoke a different reaction -- spurring health officials to prevent disease outbreaks and save lives. Assaf Anyamba, a research scientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and the Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center, warned officials in Kenya last fall that weather conditions were ripe for an outbreak of Rift Valley Fever, or RVF, a lethal disease transmitted by mosquitoes.

Make polluters pay for emission permits Polluting companies and their consultants never seem to stop in their attempts to roll back environmental laws. And John Bewick's column "Let market fight global warming" (Opinion Commentary, Dec. 1) was particularly self-serving and selective in its use of facts. Maryland will soon join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an agreement among seven other states in the region to reduce global warming pollution from power plants. This initiative's requirement that the state reduce emissions by 10 percent by 2019 is entirely achievable, if we make real reductions in emissions from power plants.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The symptoms sound like something out of a horror movie: crawling and biting sensations all over the skin, dementia and insomnia, painful sores that never heal and, most terrifying of all, mysterious tangled fibers pushing out through the open wounds. Thousands of victims concentrated in Texas, California and Florida claim to be afflicted by the debilitating malady, for which there is no known cause and no certain cure. One young Austin man apparently committed suicide when the agony grew too acute, while many others, spurned by disbelieving doctors, are suffering in silence.

The cherry-red spots on the baby boy's retina told a tale of genetic catastrophe: Conner Hopf, 11 months old, almost surely will not live to see his fifth birthday. Before he dies, he's likely to go blind, lose much of his hearing and become unable to move. He will probably never learn to speak. He has a rare degenerative disease known as Tay-Sachs, which once principally struck children of Eastern or Central European Jewish heritage. But a nationwide screening program for prospective parents that began in Baltimore 30 years ago has been so effective that the number of Tay-Sachs babies born to parents who identify themselves as Jewish has fallen by 90 percent.