Kidney

WEATHER Today's forecast calls for partly sunny skies, a chance of rain and thunderstorms, and a high temperature near 75 degrees. Tonight is expected to be mostly cloudy, with a low temperature around 59 degrees. TRAFFIC Check our traffic updates for this morning's issues as you plan your commute. FROM LAST NIGHT... City Council president to unveil spending plan : Baltimore City Council President Bernard C. "Jack" Young plans to unveil a plan Monday that he says will prevent fire companies and recreation centers from closing, double funding for youth summer jobs and after-school programs and lessen the cost of planned cuts to health benefits for employees and retirees.

Working poor people struggle to pay rising rent, electirc and other necessary bills. Obamacare is requiring us to buy heath insurance or face a fine. It is telling working families how to budget and spend their money. I am not against sick people obtaining coverage. I have a daughter with kidney disease and another daughter with hydrocephalus (water on the brain). I've paid COBRA rates. I am not against reducing those rates. I am not against anyone receiving the care they need, but there needs to be a better way to reform!

A 43-year-old man pleaded guilty yesterday to trying to kill A. Robert Kaufman, a Baltimore landlord and long-shot candidate for the U.S. Senate who was clubbed with a crowbar and stabbed in a rent dispute with one of his tenants. After a Circuit Court judge sentenced Henry Leon Davis to 12 years in prison, Kaufman turned to the defendant and asked him for a kidney donation. The socialist and perennial candidate for public office has said that his kidneys failed because of blood poisoning from the knife used in the attack.

Washington -- Since almost everything else is for sale, why not a market in healthy human kidneys and other organs that can be spared, taken from cash-hungry donors for transplanting into patients with ready cash?Why not? In India, Egypt and other third-world countries with centers of high-tech medicine, a booming trade in kidney transplants benefits wealthy patients and provides several thousand dollars for each donor.In the wealthy West, that may look like blood money, and little of it for what's involved.

"Prelude to a Scream," by Jim Nisbet. Carroll & Graf. 384 pages. $24. Jim Nisbet has taken an urban novel noir, folded in a grisly medical thriller, sprinkled on some literary pretensions for good measure, and come up with a impressively repulsive melange.Your own tastes should tell you whether to take this as a recommendation or a warning. The book's inventive spirit may please readers who can stomach aberrant behavior of the medical, sexual and ethical varieties. But even these hardy souls should immediately start practicing the fine art of suspending disbelief.

A web of misfortune seems only to deepen for Baltimore's best-known Socialist, A. Robert Kaufman. The perennial candidate - who has never won an election - was nearly knifed to death last year by a tenant in his West Baltimore boarding house, and suffered kidney failure as a result of the injuries. Since then, he hasn't been shy about asking just about anyone - even his imprisoned attacker - for a kidney that might turn around his health. And now, like deja vu, he's been attacked again, by another tenant.

When he decided, finally, that it was time to end the life of a woman he loved, Tony Boston knew the perfect place was church, in front of God and the whole congregation. It would be a gesture as big and dramatic as the woman herself. After all, there was no hope of hiding his plan. Nearly everyone in Baltimore knew this woman, or at least had heard of her. She could walk into a room, all brassy, sassy 350-plus pounds of her, and bring you to your feet, singing, dancing, laughing.

A popular "Downton Abbey" character died in childbirth from eclampsia in a storyline that shocked audiences. But what exactly is eclampsia, and does it kill modern-day moms? Barbara Deller, a nurse-midwife and senior maternal and newborn health adviser at Jhpiego, an international health non-profit organization and affiliate of the Johns Hopkins University, fills us in on the illness. What is eclampsia and what kind of dangers does it pose to pregnant women? Eclampsia is a serious, potentially fatal complication of pregnancy in which the woman, usually after the 20th week of pregnancy, develops high blood pressure, protein in her urine (proteinuria)

The story of a 24-year-old Georgia graduate student fighting a flesh-eating disease has prompted a microbiologist with the Veterans Affairs Maryland Health Care System to speak out about the infection. Aimee Copeland lost most of her left leg after the flesh-eating bacteria necrotizing faciitis is believed to have entered a cut on her leg, according to the Associated Press, which reports she may also have to have her fingers amputated. The waterborne bacteria Aeromonas hydrophila is believed to have caused the infection.

I want to thank you because your article on a potential cause of bad breath has solved a long-standing problem of mine. No doctor was able to tell me why I had halitosis, and standard tests were not useful.When I read in your column about a blood test for a germ in the stomach that causes ulcers, bad breath and gastritis, I checked with my doctor. He had never heard of this condition but he gave me the blood test and was surprised when it turned up positive. He was so interested in Helicobacter pylori that he told other doctors about it. He prescribed antibiotics to kill it.Now I am fine after years of bad breath.