Virus

Maryland health officials are reporting the state's first death from the West Nile virus. State health department spokeswoman Dori Henry said Thursday that the department is not releasing any details on the death. Maryland has had 13 cases of West Nile virus this year. Nineteen cases, including one death, were reported last year, and 23 cases the year before in Maryland. Federal officials announced Wednesday that West Nile cases nationwide are up 40 percent since last week and may rival the record years of 2002 and 2003.

A global nonprofit that battles the spread of viruses has moved into the University of Maryland BioPark after sprouting from the university's Institute of Human Virology. Global Virus Network is the west side research park's newest tenant. It moved from incubator space in the virology institute, within the University of Maryland School of Medicine. GVN combines the resources and expertise of 30 virology research centers in 21 countries, helping them to share information and ideas to explore vaccine development, understand virus behavior and respond to viral outbreaks.

Anew study reconfirms that millions of young American women ages 14 to 24 are infected with the virus that can cause cervical cancer. More young women should be protected against the virus, but there's no need to mandate a promising vaccine at this time. Human papillomavirus, or HPV, is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the country, infecting more than 33 percent of women by age 24 and about 25 percent of women under 60. The new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 7.5 million teenage girls and young women carry the virus.

Samson, the young male elephant who was diagnosed with a deadly virus at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore late last month, has continued to recover in recent days and has "turned a very positive corner" in his treatment, according to zoo officials. "His energy levels are very close to normal again, he's much brighter and a lot of his symptoms have either gone away or are nearly gone," Michael McClure, general curator for the zoo's animal department, said Thursday. McClure said he and his staff have been nursing Samson back to health around the clock for nearly four weeks and are encouraged by his recovery from the virus, known as elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus.

Tim Couch had a touch of a virus yesterday and the entire Cleveland Browns' team had a sick look. Couch, the first pick in the collegiate draft last April, looked like a struggling rookie quarterback as he completed nine of 21 passes for 57 yards before he was yanked in the fourth quarter for the first time in his athletic career in the 41-9 loss to the Ravens.Although neither Couch nor coach Chris Palmer mentioned it, backup quarterback Ty Detmer...

Samson, the young male elephant who was diagnosed with a deadly virus at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore late last month, has continued to recover in recent days and has "turned a very positive corner" in his treatment, according to zoo officials. "His energy levels are very close to normal again, he's much brighter and a lot of his symptoms have either gone away or are nearly gone," Michael McClure, general curator for the zoo's animal department, said Thursday. McClure said he and his staff have been nursing Samson back to health around the clock for nearly four weeks and are encouraged by his recovery from the virus, known as elephant endotheliotropic herpes virus.

Chicago. -- Is there ever reason to wipe out the last survivors of a life form, to terminate forever, deliberately and with cold calculation, living things that can never be duplicated?What if the life forms might possibly be useful against enemies in some future war? What if they contain genetic secrets still undiscovered or unimagined? What if some day there might be a use for these organisms after they are extinct?Unbelievably, such questions are still being raised about the planned execution -- now expected by December 1993 -- of the last known smallpox virus.

KIKWIT, Zaire -- Sister Dinarosa Belleri, an Italian nursing nun who devoted nearly three decades to serving the poor and sick here, had an unusual funeral yesterday in the sad and dusty graveyard behind the city's cathedral.The coffin came on a hospital gurney. The five pallbearers wore full-length green gowns, heavy plastic goggles, surgical face masks, white helmets, thick gloves and knee-high rubber boots. They nearly dropped the casket before nervously lowering it into the freshly dug grave.

The SARS virus, which has killed 774 people worldwide, has long been known to come from an animal. Now two scientific teams have independently identified the Chinese horseshoe bat as that animal and as a hiding place for the virus in nature. The bats apparently are healthy carriers of SARS, which caused severe economic losses, particularly in Asia, as it spread to Canada and other countries. In Asia, many people eat bats or use bat feces in traditional medicine for asthma, kidney ailments and general malaise.

Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, by John Crewdson. Little, Brown. 670 pages. $27.95. Fifteen years ago, Robert Gallo was a star. A researcher at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., he was famed as the discoverer of HTLV-3, the virus that causes AIDS. Gallo was collecting $100,000 a year from the key patent on the test for this virus, and he - and everyone else in the medical world - figured he would win the Nobel Prize.

A dozen or more cases of mumps have been reported among Loyola University Maryland students over the past month, prompting officials to alert the campus community to signs of the rare virus that has spread rapidly across college campuses in recent outbreaks. That's as many cases as have occurred in a typical year statewide since 2005, when the state health department started tracking outbreaks. Confirmed and suspected infections were found in undergraduate students in multiple class years and living both on and off Loyola's North Baltimore campus.

A deadly virus has stricken Samson, the only elephant born at the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore in its 137-year history, but zoologists are hopeful that he will recover because the strain is thought to be less serious in his species. Samson also has survived longer than others with the virus. Caretakers first noticed the soon-to-be-5-year-old male looking lethargic Feb. 26, and feared it was a sign of what is known as elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus. They began treating him for the disease, which can kill within days, and tests confirmed the virus.

When police accused an Edgemere man of having sex with a 13-year-old boy, most of the charges were straightforward: soliciting a minor and a related sexual offense, which together could carry up to 30 years in prison. But Baltimore County prosecutors also accused Steven Douglas Podles of knowingly attempting to transmit the HIV virus to the boy - a seldom-used, and often controversial, charge that carries an additional three years behind bars. Even as prosecutors prepare their case against Podles, the effectiveness of such laws is being debated by legislators and public health officials from Maryland to California.

Baltimore, Anne Arundel and Prince George's counties are getting sprayed for mosquitoes and health officials are warning residents to take precautions as the nation copes with the worst season of West Nile Virus since the disease was discovered in the United States in 1999. One person in Maryland has died from the disease this summer and 21 have contracted it, according to the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. Nationally, the potentially fatal disease, spread by mosquitoes that pick it up from infected birds, has afflicted 1,993 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

For the first year in more than a decade, no rabies vaccine baits will be placed in Anne Arundel, after the county was cut from the federal program, according to county health officials. The project used a county police helicopter and volunteers to immunize thousands of raccoons and other small wild animals in an effort to prevent the spread of the deadly virus, dropping baits to be eaten by the animals in late summer and fall. The number of reported rabies cases has plummeted since the county began using the edible vaccine baits, starting with a small area in 1998.

An adult in Central Maryland has been diagnosed with this year's first case of West Nile Virus, according to The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The virus was also detected in a pool of mosquitoes collected in Montgomery County by the U.S. Department of Defense. Most people with West Nile virus do not show symptoms. Those who do will have a fever, headache, body aches, skin rash and swollen lymph glands 3 to 15 days after a bite by an infected mosquito.

International Business Machines Corp. said yesterday that several thousand of its Aptiva personal computers may have a virus that can shut down the PC. Aptivas that may be affected include models 240, 301, 520 and 580, built between March 5 and 17. The virus is spread when some files are transferred from one PC to another. The bug may shut down the machine if the PC's calendar reads April 26 of any year. Pub Date: 4/07/99

A deadly waterfowl virus is afoot among the ducks and geese that congregate in a cove near Anne Arundel County's Riviera Beach, and state wildlife officials are preparing to round up and destroy dozens of birds in hopes of curbing the outbreak.Robert Gould, spokesman for the Department of Natural Resources, said the virus was discovered after a resident of the area reported finding dead ducks by the shore of Stony Creek last week.Dead and live birds were tested at state laboratories in College Park and Salisbury and found to be infected with DVE, or duck virus enteritis, a disease related to the herpes virus.

The FBI is alerting the public to a sneaky, new virus being distributed over the Internet that that claims to be an alert issued by federal investigators who allege the computer user visited child porn sites or engaged in other illegal activity. The virus, which locks up and freezes the user's computer, then demands $200 payment via a pre-paid credit card in order for the user to regain control of the computer. “We're getting inundated with complaints,” said Donna Gregory of the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)