Epidemic

CAN we meet?Can we meet and meet and meet and meet and meet?Can we meet in public boards and private commissions, on cable TV and in no-comment executive sessions, around speaker phones, over working breakfasts, working lunches, working breaks, working dinners, working snacks?Can we meet? Can we meet off site, meet on site, meet over the Web site, meet at a pre-meeting meeting? How about one of those all-day retreat meetings? How about a pre-meeting meeting before the meeting at the all-day retreat?

WASHINGTON -- Seventeen years after AIDS was first recognized among gay white men in New York and San Francisco, the disease in this country is becoming largely an epidemic among black people, quietly devastating families and neighborhoods, yet all but ignored by leading black institutions.Blacks make up 13 percent of the U.S. population. But they now account for about 57 percent of new infections with human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

NEW YORK -- The United Nations AIDS organization has released disturbing estimates of the seemingly relentless expansion of the HIV pandemic.At a time when many Americans are optimistic that drug therapy might eliminate the virus, HIV is taking a heavy toll worldwide.According to the agency, every minute six people become infected with HIV: 7,500 adults per day and 1,000 children. About 30 million people have acquired the virus during the past 15 years; 6.4 million of them have died of AIDS.

I hate to put a fly in your ointment, but if you think that just because you live in America, you are safe from the terror of terrorism, then I have three words for you: ha ha ha.I make this statement in light of a terrifying incident that occurred on Christmas Eve, according to an article from the Newport, Ore., News-Times, written by Gail Kimberling and sent in by alert reader Deane Bristow, whose name can be rearranged to spell "Sewer Bandito," although...

Although the number of new AIDS cases in the United States dipped last year, the epidemic has shown no signs of abating in Baltimore and Maryland.With 2,951 people diagnosed in the state last fiscal year, Maryland had the fourth-highest rate of new cases in the nation, trailing New York, Florida and New Jersey, according to figures released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Two years ago, the state ranked eighth.In the fiscal year that ended June 30, about 59 new cases were diagnosed for every 100,000 people living in the state, compared with 45 per 100,000 a year earlier.

Health officials in India believe they have brought under control an outbreak of plague that began last month in the western city of Surat. Within days it had spread from one coast to the other.With modern medicines and sanitary methods, India appears to have been able to limit the loss of life. But already scores of people have died and hundreds have contracted the deadly disease.Throughout history plague has been one of the major killers of mankind, attacking in devastating epidemics that brought death and terror to millions.

Washington. -- A reasonable surmise is that, about 50 years ago, in east and central Africa, some hunters and their families who ate monkeys became infected with a low-virulence (and for a long time quiescent) progenitor of what is now known to be the virus that causes AIDS. Thus on the continent where the human race may have begun, there began an epidemic.Its dynamics have now led some researchers to an encouraging conclusion: In America, the disease is largely concentrated in perhaps 30 neighborhoods nationwide.

DESPITE a recent report suggesting that AIDS may have only a limited impact on most U.S. communities, the worldwide death toll will be staggering. Recently, AIDS expert Dr. John G. Bartlett of Johns Hopkins University told newspaper editors gathered in Baltimore that AIDS will claim the lives of over 25 million people by 1997 -- making AIDS the deadliest epidemic in human history.The countries hardest hit by the epidemic will be the developing nations of Asia and Africa. The virus is also spreading, though less rapidly, in Latin America and the Caribbean.

THIS IS the flu season, and there is misery enough to go around. The flu can be life-threatening to some, but the vast majority of us suffer it ungladly, returning to normal life after a week or so of aches and sniffles.In the 19th century and early part of this century, though, flu was a real killer. In the 1918 flu epidemic, Baltimore had the grisly honor of being second only to Philadelphia in number of deaths per thousand residents. Seven of every 1,000 Baltimoreans who contracted the flu -- the young and the old, the rich and the poor -- died from it in a matter of weeks.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The number of new AIDS cases in this epicenter of the epidemic is expected to peak this year after more than a decade of spiraling increase.That's the good news.The bad news is that financial costs of acquired immune deficiency syndrome will continue to mushroom at a time the city can least afford it. Without a huge infusion of federal money, the epidemic soon may overwhelm local health agencies and trigger an ugly tug-of-war among the many who compete for shrinking city funds.

A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association that the U.S. may have underestimated the number of new HIV infections occurring each year over the last decade by as much as 40 percent should send up red flags for Maryland health officials, particularly in Baltimore, which accounts for nearly half the state's AIDS cases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that nationally, 56,300 people were newly infected with HIV in 2006. Previous estimates had put the number at 40,000.

While just a teenager in the 1970s, she danced on The Block, where she snorted cocaine and heroin and sold sex in backrooms. Later, with her addictions firmly rooted, she set out on her own, offering her body on the streets of West Baltimore as a deadly virus was spreading. The years have worn away at Sharon Williams, whose deeply lined face, reddened eyes and pained expressions tell of poor health, nights in abandoned buildings and customers like the man who kicked her down a flight of stairs, breaking two ribs and puncturing a lung.

There's enough food in the world. So why is there hunger? Why are 850 million people worldwide malnourished? The answer is simple: They live in societies that can't provide them with the means of support. The best cure for hunger is prosperity - providing it's well managed. During the 1990s, China reduced the number of undernourished people by 43 million, not because of aid programs but because of a booming economy. India is on the same track - but it's an uneven one because parts of the country are hobbled by corruption, caste prejudice, the AIDS epidemic and a lack of schooling.

Seven years ago, John McCarthy woke up from heart surgery with a smile on his face, drawing a puzzled expression from a doctor who expected to see a man in despair. "I never thought I'd live long enough to have a heart attack," McCarthy told the physician, a Johns Hopkins psychiatrist. An alcoholic and drug addict, McCarthy had tested positive for the AIDS virus in the late 1980s - when doctors could offer little effective treatment, and many of his fellow drug users were wasting away and dying.

Women are being infected with HIV at increasing rates in all regions of the world, and their numbers are nearly equal to those of men, according to the United Nations and World Health Organization's annual report on AIDS released yesterday. The increase among women has been especially steep in East Asia - which has experienced a 56 percent climb in the past two years - and Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where rates have risen 48 percent. In sub-Saharan Africa, 57 percent of adults living with HIV are women.

BEIJING - Former President Bill Clinton addressed a conference on AIDS at one of China's most prestigious universities yesterday, delivering a message to top officials that they must confront the country's HIV epidemic - but the top officials weren't there to hear him. Qinghua University's AIDS and SARS Summit symbolized China's muddled approach to HIV and AIDS. That the conference was even held reflected an increasing official acceptance that the nation faces a crisis, with as many as 2 million people infected with HIV and projections of 10 million to 20 million cases by 2010.

BEIJING - Giving the clearest signal yet that the SARS epidemic is under control in the country where it began, the World Health Organization's executive director for communicable diseases said yesterday that WHO officials would consider lifting travel warnings for China. Dr. David Heymann refused to speculate on when the warnings might be canceled, and said the decision would be made by the organization's director-general, Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland. But Heymann cautioned that SARS remains mysterious and that China and other countries must guard against reinfection.

An American doctor advising Taiwan on fighting its SARS epidemic has come down with symptoms of the respiratory disease and will be flown home by air ambulance with three of his healthy colleagues, the governments of both countries said yesterday. It is not certain that the doctor, Chesley L. Richards Jr., an epidemiologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has SARS. But if he does, Richards, 42, will be the first American investigator to have contracted severe acute respiratory syndrome.

BEIJING - In a live, televised news conference, the new acting mayor of Beijing called the SARS epidemic severe and uncontrolled yesterday as he sought to convince a panicky public that the battle against the disease had been effectively joined at last. "We are now facing up to this grave difficulty," said the acting mayor, Wang Qishan, a former banking chief and a protege of the no-nonsense former prime minister, Zhu Rongji. Wang was summoned to Beijing 10 days ago to replace the former mayor, Meng Xuenong, who was fired for his part in covering up the city's surging epidemic.

HALTING THE SPREAD of an epidemic is not a job for sissies. It requires aggressive action, blunt truth and sometimes painful precautionary measures. So, as much as we might sympathize with Toronto officials for the economic damage their city is suffering from a World Health Organization warning on travel there, the travel advisory seems justified. News that a Maryland doctor may have inadvertently brought severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, home with him from the Canadian city underscores that there is no more time for dithering.