Hepatitis

State health department inspectors will conduct a complete review of operations at the troubled Maryland General Hospital, looking beyond the laboratory problems that have been the recent focus of investigation. Federal officials requested the state take this unusual step after concluding that the hospital has serious deficiencies in three areas, according to an April 5 letter made public yesterday: quality assessment, laboratory services and oversight by the hospital's governing body.

The Baltimore County Council last night voted to enlist the help of Mickey Mouse to help ensure that youngsters receive their immunizations on time.The council gave its approval for a contest in which parents who have their children fully immunized by 18 months can be eligible to win a trip to Walt Disney World and other Florida attractions.Officials hope publicity about the prize will increase immunizations for hepatitis, diphtheria and other childhood diseases from from 62 percent to more than 80 percent for children younger than age 2.State officials say the immunization rate for school-age children is nearly 100 percent.

BEIJING -- A leading imprisoned Chinese dissident, Chen Ziming, began a hunger strike yesterday to protest the squalid conditions of his solitary confinement cell, friends of his family said last night.It was not clear whether Wang Juntao was carrying out a threat to start his own hunger strike for the same reason, according to friends of both men's families.The two dissidents have been labeled by the government as the masterminds behind the June 1989 pro-democracy protests.The uncertainty over Mr. Wang's situation arose in part because both his wife and Mr. Chen's were barred by prison authorities this week from monthly visits, the friends said.

While surgeons in Pittsburgh were transplanting the liver of a baboon into a man's body, animal activists at the hospital entrance were chanting, "Animals are no spare parts."Their protest was interrupted by Robert Winters, a patient on his way to a hepatitis treatment. Hepatitis attacks and destroys the liver. Starting up the steps, Mr. Winters shouted: "I didn't ask for this! But I've got it and I'm fighting it just like that guy [getting a transplant] up there! You don't have a right to be standing here!"

Shares in Human Genome Sciences Inc., a 15-year-old Rockville biotech company that has yet to get a drug on the market, plummeted to their lowest level since 1995 yesterday after disclosing that serious side effects emerged during a clinical trial of a potentially lucrative hepatitis treatment when patients received high doses. The share price dropped nearly $4.40 to $5.62, or almost 44 percent. Human Genome Sciences officials said they were still optimistic that Albuferon would win approval - and have market success - at a lower dose.

Schering-Plough Corp. intends to develop and market a unique interferon identified at Human Genome Sciences Inc., marking the first time another company has licensed a protein discovered by the Rockville-based drug developer. Human Genome said yesterday that it will get "modest" payments from Schering-Plough as that company reaches milestones in the testing of the interferon, one of a family of proteins important in modulating the immune system. Human Genome also stands to get royalties from the sales of any related drug Schering-Plough puts on the market.

Maryland General Hospital's laboratory, under scrutiny for months after workers there sent out hundreds of possibly inaccurate lab test results, has corrected major problems, federal regulators have found, and is again in compliance with conditions for participating in Medicare. Regulators who inspected the hospital as a whole last month found that it, too, met the standards for participation in Medicare, despite some violations: a dirty kitchen floor, failure to keep a current nursing care plan for three of 51 patients sampled and a "very messy, disorganized and dirty" pharmacy that was largely cleaned up by the next day. But overall, the Baltimore hospital considers the compliance findings good news.

No matter the destination, travelers often come home with more than pictures and T-shirts. They pick up a malady - a cold or a stomach ailment, or worse. But as the summer travel season gets under way, those in the business of keeping people healthy say good planning and some vigilance can increase the odds of keeping illness at bay. They say that for most people traveling domestically by car, train or plane, the most important steps to staying healthy - or at least reducing the severity of a cold - are simple.

In jaundice, the skin, whites of the eyes and mucus membranes take on a yellowish color. Jaundice itself is not an illness, but a sign of an underlying disease, says Dr. Richard Mackey, a hepatobiliary surgeon with the Cancer Institute at St. Joseph Medical Center. If you think you or someone else is showing the symptoms of jaundice, you should seek medical attention. What is jaundice? Jaundice is more a sign that something is abnormal than a disease process in itself. It's a sign of an abnormality, of an underlying disease.

Michael Landon's good humor last week as he announced to the press in California that he has advanced pancreatic cancer was an exhibition of extraordinary grace in a difficult situation.In fact, the prognosis in most cases of cancer of the pancreas is not encouraging: The vast majority of pancreatic tumors are known as adenocarcinomas, which rarely cause symptoms until they have passed the point of no return.Cure is rare, and survival time is more often measured in months than in years, according to Dr. Richard Kaplan, associate professor of oncology and medicine at the University of Maryland Oncology Center.