Transmission

The fight against HIV and AIDS hinges on two equally important factors: preventing transmission and getting treatment. But the first step is knowing whether you're infected at all. "There are significant consequences of not knowing the truth," said Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, Baltimore health commissioner. "The real concern is if someone was thinking they were negative and actually were positive, they may not be as careful as they should be" when engaging in sexual activity. The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, can be transmitted during unprotected sex with an infected person or by sharing drug needles with someone who is infected.

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The World Health Organization said yesterday that two sisters who died in Vietnam's Thai Binh province last week were victims of avian influenza and might have contracted the disease from their brother. If confirmed, the sisters' deaths would represent the first human-to-human transmission of the illness. Until now, health officials had concluded that human victims in Vietnam and Thailand were contracting the virus through direct contact with infected fowl. The deaths of the two women bring to 10 the number of confirmed bird flu deaths in Vietnam.

In the 1999 movie October Sky, the sons of coal mine workers in West Virginia build rockets and improbably end up winning a national science contest. That movie inspired two brothers from Connecticut, sons of a nuclear engineer and a special education teacher, who took top honors as a team in this year's Siemens Westinghouse Math, Science and Technology competition. "We found that really inspirational - to see kids who come from an area that's virtually not on the map," said Mark Schneider, 18, whose project with his brother, Jeffrey, 16, focused on the West Nile virus.

WASHINGTON -The nation's worst blackout was a "largely preventable" event caused by a constellation of failures at Ohio's FirstEnergy Corp., a team of government investigators reported yesterday. The widespread power outages Aug. 14 were triggered by the loss of three high-voltage transmission lines in Northern Ohio - which short-circuited after getting tangled with trees - and by a failure of Akron-based FirstEnergy Corp. operators to contain the problem, according to findings of a U.S.-Canadian Task Force.

Investigators probing the cause of the epic Northeast blackout this summer will release findings today that are expected to help shape new rules governing the nation's electricity system. But some people fear that any lessons learned from the report on the sweeping Aug. 14 power failure would be eclipsed by a 1,400-page energy bill being voted on by Congress. The bill is likely to win final congressional approval this week. "It's safe to say that the timing of the report renders it useless as a policy-setting tool," said Jude McCartin, spokeswoman for Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, a Democratic member of the Energy Committee.

ATLANTA - When the lights went out in the Midwest and Northeast on Aug. 14, engineers here at the headquarters of the energy giant Southern Co. could tell something was wrong. In a glassed-in operations center in the belly of an office tower, their grid displays showed electricity frequency spiking. But the blackout touched none of Southern's customers, who, like those in the rest of the South and the Northwest, enjoy some of the nation's cheapest and most reliable electricity. And people such as Dwight H. Evans, executive vice president of Southern, want to keep it that way. "We made the right choices in the South," Evans says, sitting in his top-floor office overlooking the Atlanta skyline.

THE GREAT blackout of 2003 last month has pushed lawmakers and the Bush administration to fast-track needed legislation to ensure that electricity consistently flows to U.S. consumers. And a good thing, too. Because while widespread outages caused by disasters such as Hurricane Isabel may not be preventable, every effort must be made to ensure that the infrastructure can handle the nation's ever-increasing daily grind. In the two versions of the mammoth energy bill now before Congress, much that relates to improving the electrical grid is worthy, but one of the details is not. On the good side: Giving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission real power to enforce reliability standards across the grid is necessary.

PHILADELPHIA - Preventing power outages and keeping the nation's electric system running efficiently in a newly competitive market will require a clearer set of rules and more centralized, regional monitoring of the way electricity is transmitted, system operators and regulators said yesterday during an industry summit in Philadelphia. The Aug. 14 blackout that cut power to 50 million people in the United States and Canada added a sense of urgency to the annual gathering of key energy players in the mid -Atlantic region, who met to sort out the problems of a once heavily regulated industry going through restructuring.

EVENTS OF THE past two weeks have brought to the front pages a vigorous debate about this country's electricity infrastructure. The debate has pitted federal against state authority, region against region, and free markets against regulation. This discussion is based on actions of a decade ago. In 1992, in response to calls for greater economic efficiency in our electricity industry, but also prodded by political pressure from new market players, Congress laid the groundwork for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC)

Congress must push for mandatory rules for electricity grids and the industry must stockpile critical equipment for use in the event of a terrorist attack, the National Commission on Energy Policy said yesterday. "The massive power outages two weeks ago are symptoms of a system that needs both new regulatory requirements and better economic incentives," said John W. Rowe, co-chairman of the bipartisan commission and chairman of Exelon Corp. The group's recommendations likely would be funded by taxpayers and electricity users.