Fort Detrick

ANNAPOLIS -- Maryland fire and rescue crews will have one less "bio-headache" when American Type Culture Collection moves to Northern Virginia this month and takes its store of germs with it.But local emergency crews cannot relax - Montgomery and Frederick counties are still home to America's foremost research institutions on diseases and germ warfare.Not only are Fort Detrick and the National Institutes of Health still around, but they will soon be home to two of the three "biosafety level 4" labs in the country.

When Mary-Melissa Harris met her future husband several years ago, she advised him to quit his engineering studies and do what he really wanted -- make and refinish furniture.He did exactly that. And four children later, he returned the compliment, advising his wife to leave her job as night secretary at Frederick Memorial Hospital and start an upholstery business.Today, they are both doing what they love -- and making a comfortable living together doing it.Part of their satisfaction is that the success of her 5-year-old business in Taneytown has grown largely by word of mouth.

For the second time in his 75 years, a drought has forced James Grumbine to ask for government help. The Unionville farmer drove to Fort Detrick yesterday, ready to load 100-pound bales of free hay onto a flatbed truck.Since early September, Frederick County has offered an emergency hay lift to hard-pressed farmers who are reeling from the driest summer in three decades. So far, about 160 tons of hay -- a commodity that has become as scarce as rain in Western Maryland -- have come from Southern Maryland and Eastern Shore farms.

FORT DETRICK -- It almost seems like science fiction: A geneticist sets out to discover why identical sister cells of yeast develop differently -- and comes up with an explanation as to why most people are right-handed.What's more: His answer may advance the search for a cure for cancer.At the moment, however, the route is paved with controversy. The scientist -- Amar Klar, head of a basic research lab at the National Cancer Institute's Frederick campus -- is proposing that genetics causes right-handedness, while many scientists still believe it is environmentally determined.

FREDERICK -- Government scientists wearing plastic "space suits" planned to work all though last night to determine if the Ebola virus that infected at least two monkeys at a Texas breeding facility had spread to a second monkey house there.The scientists, at Fort Detrick's U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), continued their probe as Texas health officials began killing 48 monkeys in a building run by a company that supplies animals to research laboratories around the country.

A high-technology unit at Fort Detrick in Frederick is scrambling to provide medical help for U.S. soldiers now performing peacekeeping duties in Bosnia.The U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command is mounting an $8.6 million project to link doctors at field hospitals in Bosnia with specialists in Germany and the United States, said Mark Schnur, communications director for the command's telemedicine office.Using portable computers, video cameras and satellite dishes, field medics will be able to consult with specialists not assigned to Bosnia and "show" them soldiers needing treatment.

FireTaneytown: Firefighters from Union Bridge, Harney, New Windsor, Gamber, Littlestown, Pa., and Fort Detrick in Frederick County assisted Taneytown at 9: 17 p.m. Sunday, responding to a house fire in the 2400 block of Roop Road. Units were out eight hours and 33 minutes.Pub Date: 9/04/96

FREDERICK -- Behind sea-green cinder block walls and stainless steel doors, protected by space suits and sterilizing chemical showers, scientists here are searching for weapons to fight one of Earth's most dangerous predators.This is Fort Detrick's U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, one of only five laboratories in the world equipped for the study of such super-lethal, untreatable diseases as Marburg, Lassa and Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever.But recent books, a movie and a deadly epidemic in Africa have focused an international spotlight on USAMRIID's work on one murderous microbe in particular: the Ebola virus.

FREDERICK -- Preliminary analyses of soil from test trenches in a Fort Detrick landfill thought to be the main source of toxins tainting nearby wells reveal no traces of the expected chemicals, Army officials say.During recent excavation of Pit 11, a trench where acids, solvents and chemicals likely were buried decades ago, Army and state officials were puzzled to find only normal refuse -- household waste, newspapers, burned timbers and soda cans.They...

FREDERICK -- Dressed in thick rubber gloves, surgical garb and a helmet that fed him microbe-free air, Capt. Neal E. Woollen spent workday afternoons over the past two months standing in a clearing in an African forest, dissecting gazelles, lizards, monkeys, mongooses and jackals.The Army veterinarian was part of an international team of scientists sent to the city of Kikwit, in central Zaire, after an outbreak of the lethal Ebola virus. That outbreak has infected 296 people and killed 233 -- a mortality rate of almost 80 percent.

Shuttle named Charm City Circulator The free downtown shuttle bus system that debuts this summer is to be called the "Charm City Circulator," Mayor Sheila Dixon announced Wednesday. The name was submitted by 24-year-old Cherry Hill resident Michelle C. Brand and selected from about 2,700 entries by a committee that included the Downtown Partnership, neighborhood representatives and city employees. Brand will receive about $1,000 in prizes. Paid for by a recent increase in parking taxes, the circulator will include 21 clean-energy buses and three routes.

Officer faces sex assault charges A Baltimore City schools police officer was arrested Wednesday after a grand jury indicted him in the sexual assault of a 16-year-old student. Reginald Watson, 35, of the 2200 block of Fleetwood Ave., is charged with sexual abuse of a minor, fourth-degree sex assault and second-degree assault in the alleged incident on Feb. 19 at Masonville Cove Community Academy, in the 1200 block of Cambria St. in Brooklyn. According to police, the student was walking in the hallways when Watson bought her snacks and took her into an office, where he allegedly made sexually explicit remarks to her and placed his hands on her hips and buttocks.

The biodefense lab at Fort Detrick in Frederick began a thorough search of its freezers yesterday to ensure that it has an accurate inventory of the deadly bacteria, viruses and toxins accumulated there over a period of 40 years, Defense Department officials said. Col. John P. Skvorak, commander of the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases, ordered a "stand-down," or pause in ordinary operations, and a complete inventory last week after 20 vials of "biological select agents and toxin" (BSAT)

WASHINGTON - Amid continuing questions from some lawmakers and others about the FBI's investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, the FBI is asking the National Academy of Sciences to review its probe, Director Robert S. Mueller III said yesterday. Among the issues that the independent organization likely would examine is how FBI analysts traced anthrax powder that was mailed to two U.S. senators and several news organizations to the Fort Detrick laboratory of Bruce E. Ivins, who killed himself in July.

Eli Rody Vuicich, a scientist, athlete and restaurateur who co-owned Ordell Braase's Flaming Pit and seemed to always be pulling someone's leg with a wink and a smile, died of congestive heart failure Sept. 2 at his home in Timonium. He was 86. Mr. Vuicich grew up in Hibbing, Minn., where - as he often recounted - he delivered milk and papers to help support his mother, two brothers and a sister after his father died. A star athlete in high school, he was inducted into the Hibbing Hall of Fame for basketball and baseball.

The Jedi master of fishing, Lefty Kreh, is the subject of two new books. Most of us would kill for one volume, and here's Lefty with two keepers. One he has put together himself, something he has been threatening to do for some time but never found the time. The other is a tribute from some of fishing's big names. Kreh, who held the job I now have until his "retirement" in January 1992, has written an entire library full of fishing books and magazine articles. But for his autobiography, My Life Was This Big, he has teamed up with Chris Millard, a former editor at Golf World magazine.

Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler is pushing the Pentagon to do the right thing - obey the law and comply with an Environmental Protection Agency order that it quickly complete a cleanup of serious pollution at Fort Meade. He's threatening to sue if the Army fails to act. The Pentagon's assurance that public health and safety are not imperiled as it cleans up the Superfund site at its own pace and with its own priorities is not credible. The EPA issued the Fort Meade cleanup order last year because it was worried about drinking water and soil contamination from past dumping at the Anne Arundel County base.

In case I ever turn up dead while being investigated by the Feds, and they release all the suspicious stuff they've uncovered about me, let me explain right now why I recently Googled "novel kill scientist poisoned strawberry." I was not trying to find a novel way to kill a scientist with a poisoned strawberry, OK? I was trying to remember a book I had read, in which several seemingly unrelated characters mysteriously start dying - including, I thought, a scientist who grew strawberries as a hobby, ate one and died - and it turned out they had all been involved in some secret scheme.

A day after the Justice Department released hundreds of documents purporting to link Bruce E. Ivins to the 2001 anthrax killings, scientists and legal experts criticized the strength of the case and cast doubt on whether it could have succeeded. Federal investigators presented a raft of circumstantial evidence this week intended to prove Ivins' guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But officials lacked direct evidence, such as hair fibers, DNA samples or handwriting analysis, that the eccentric microbiologist created the deadly powder in his Fort Detrick lab. Questions also remain about Ivins' ability to convert the spores stored in his lab into the powder sent through the mail.

Bruce E. Ivins may not have been the anthrax killer, but scientific, postal and investigative evidence painstakingly compiled by federal agents and released yesterday points strongly to his guilt, as declared by the FBI. The case, detailed by prosecutors and investigators, is circumstantial - there are no witnesses or incriminating statements about the attack that killed five people and terrorized the nation in 2001. But it presents a plausible portrait of Mr. Ivins as the mastermind and sole perpetrator of the first bioterrorist attack in the United States . Mr. Ivins' suicide last week prevents a conclusive resolution of the 7-year-old case.