Infectious Diseases

An employee at the National Institutes of Health was arrested yesterday, accused of making an anthrax threat against an assessor's office in Florida with which she was having a property tax dispute, the FBI's Miami office said. Michelle Ledgister, 43, of Bethesda surrendered to federal agents on the parking lot of a Rockville strip mall near her work at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Special Agent Judy Orihuela, an FBI spokeswoman. After losing a claim for property tax relief on a home she owned in Parkland, Fla., Ledgister late last month left a voice mail message at the Broward County Property Appraiser's Office in Fort Lauderdale, her arrest warrant said.

DR. ALFRED SOMMER is stepping down after 15 years as dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. In September, he will rejoin the school's faculty. Dr. Michael J. Klag will succeed him as dean. Sommer reflected on his time as dean in a phone interview from Monterey, Calif., where he was attending his last annual meeting of the country's public health deans - a gathering he started not long after taking the helm at Hopkins. What are the most important developments in public health today?

Dr. Theodore E. Woodward, a retired University of Maryland medical educator who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work in the field of infectious diseases, died of heart failure yesterday at his Roland Park home. He was 91. He was chairman of the UM medical school's Department of Medicine from 1954 to 1981, and earlier had conducted influential studies related to cholera, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, malaria and tuberculosis. "He had one of the richest careers in medicine I know about," said Dr. William L. Henrich, current chairman of the Department of Medicine.

The flu season that arrives each fall kills an average of 36,000 people in the United States alone. Far deadlier are worldwide outbreaks, called pandemics, that periodically sweep through human populations. Over the past 300 years, there have been 10 influenza pandemics, including the so-called Spanish flu of 1918-19, which killed more than 500,000 people in the United States and more than 50 million worldwide. Now, public health experts worry that an avian flu strain - called H5N1 - racing through animal populations in Southeast Asia could touch off the next pandemic.

Symptoms that linger for years. A paralysis reminiscent of polio. Blood donations that deliver an unwanted keepsake. Five years after arriving in North America, the West Nile virus continues to confound medical researchers as a fast-evolving foe with potentially permanent consequences. In a recently published survey of 35 New Yorkers hospitalized with a West Nile virus infection in 1999, researchers found that fewer than four in 10 had fully recovered one year later. Among patients who were 65 or older at the time of their initial hospitalization, only five of 22 had fully recovered.

An estimated 76 million Americans become sick from food-borne diseases each year. Many illnesses could be avoided if people washed their hands thoroughly before preparing food. -- National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases

For more than half a century, researchers have tried to create a vaccine against Group A streptococcus, the nasty infectious bacteria that cause strep throat and rheumatic fever - and kill up to half a million people a year in the developing world. They might finally be on the right track. In a study published in today's issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, scientists report that a new strep vaccine showed strong signs of working in humans and is also safe. "This is an important first step," said the study's lead author, University of Maryland vaccine researcher Karen Kotloff.

Academic researchers, business leaders and government officials said yesterday that they will band together to devise a strategy to jumpstart the government's Project BioShield, a stalled initiative to develop vaccines and other countermeasures against bioterrorism. "We believe that, just by being ingenious and creating a program of policy recommendations, Congress and the executive branch will run with it," Michael Greenberger, director of the University of Maryland Center for Health and Homeland Security (CHHS)

Dr. Harvey R. Fischman, a retired epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, died of renal failure May 13 at his Broadmead Retirement Community home in Cockeysville. He was 84. Born and raised in Brooklyn, N.Y., he earned his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College, a veterinary degree from the old Middlesex College in Waltham, Mass., and studied at Ecole Nationale Veterinaire d'Alfort in Paris. He worked with United Nations relief agencies in Asia and the Middle East to control infectious diseases among animals and to bring modern veterinary medicine to China in the 1940s and 1950s.