Disease

The first words that Bryan McMillan's best friend said to him when McMillan visited him in the hospital in March 2010 were, "How are you doing?" What would otherwise be an ordinary question shocked McMillan. His friend of 32 years, who was just diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and lying in a hospital bed adjacent to a healthy McMillan, was more interested in the other's well-being than his own. "That was one of those pivotal moments you don't forget," McMillan, 48, of Columbia, said.

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.

In Quarantine, a 1989 science fiction thriller, some zealous officials whose society was ravaged by a killer disease took drastic steps to isolate the infected. The execution might have been a little flawed - the sick were dropped through a chute to a concentration camp - but the practice is based on sound science. Trying to stem the global outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, public health practitioners in 14 countries on three continents have been employing a range of infection-control measures, including isolating hospital patients in special air-tight rooms and ordering suspected carriers to stay at home.

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.

Long before Doug Masiuk became a serious runner, he had to learn how take his lifelong battle with Type 1 diabetes one step at a time. Diagnosed when he was a toddler, Masiuk, now 38, played soccer through high school at Severna Park. Once his soccer career ended, Masiuk had to find another physical activity to help him combat a life-threatening auto-immune disease that prevents the pancreas from producing insulin and can cause dangerously high blood-sugar levels. Several years ago, Masiuk turned to long-distance running.

WASHINGTON - When women in long dresses and men in black ties ambled to the post office in days of old, they sometimes found their letters with holes whacked through them or their envelopes browned from smoke or covered in the peculiar smell of some nasty chemical. Far from angry, the patrons were relieved. To them, it meant the mail had been sanitized. The emergence of anthrax is the most serious challenge ever to the U.S. Postal Service, but history is replete with all kinds of attacks on the mail - and efforts to rid the system of biological threats go back decades, even centuries.

Samuel A. Snyder, a certified public accountant and partner at an Owings Mills firm, died Jan. 21 of Pick's disease, a rare neurological disorder, at Arden Court in Pikesville. The longtime Owings Mills resident was 56. The son of a certified public accountant and a homemaker, Mr. Snyder was born in Baltimore and raised in Pikesville. After graduating from Pikesville High School in 1972, Mr. Snyder earned a bachelor's degree in 1976 in accounting from the University of Baltimore.

1975: FBI catches Patty Hearst 1976: U.S. bicentennial 1976: Zedong, Zhou Enlai die 1976: Legionnaire's disease kills 29 Pub Date: 12/08/99

John L. Kellermann III, a Parkinson's disease sufferer who played a major role in the passage by the state legislature in 2006 of the Maryland Stem Cell Research Act and also served as a founding member of the stem cell research commission, died Monday of pancreatic cancer at his Ocean City summer home. The longtime Loch Raven Village resident was 56. Mr. Kellermann was 38 years old and a vice president of the old First National Bank of Maryland when he noticed a twitch in two fingers of his left hand.

Sometimes it's easy for Vincent Vono to feel down about having to live with Parkinson's disease. The disease has snatched his independence and sense of a normal life. The 76-year-old stopped driving last year as his motor skills slowed. He doesn't cook much because it is too exhausting to clean up afterward. Even a short walk across his tiny apartment is a task some days. But for all the disease has taken away from Vono, it has fostered and strengthened a love for art that first developed when he was a boy. Painting is the one thing that still comes easily to Vono.