Virus

On one of his last days of summer vacation, Hunter Sears would have preferred to still be in bed at 10 a.m., or maybe just settling in for a few good hours of television. So why, exactly, was the 13-year-old Anne Arundel County boy sitting in his Annapolis pediatrician's office yesterday, his orange T-shirt rolled up to his shoulder as a nurse first took blood from his arm and then gave him a shot he didn't need to get? Hunter was pediatric volunteer No.1 of an expected 600 nationwide for an experimental vaccine against the H1N1 influenza virus, a new strain of flu that appeared in April and which officials fear will be widespread come fall.

A fifth person has died of swine flu in Maryland, state health officials said Friday. The person was an adult from the Washington suburbs who had an underlying medical condition, officials said. As with other deaths from the H1N1 virus, officials would not release the person's name, gender or hometown. Since the outbreak this spring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported 436 deaths and 6,506 hospitalizations nationwide stemming from the virus. The agency has stopped keeping track of cases that don't result in deaths or hospital stays as the pandemic continues to spread.

In a race to stave off an unusually dangerous flu season, scientists at the University of Maryland and seven other universities in the U.S. will begin testing a swine flu vaccine in adults and children within the next few weeks - the first step in what could be a mass vaccination campaign. The trials, which will test the vaccines of two manufacturers, mark the launch of an aggressive government timetable to have inoculations ready for as many as 200 million Americans, including 2 million Marylanders, by mid-October.

Baltimore has its first three confirmed cases of H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, the city health department said Sunday. All of the three people infected with the virus are adults, but not elderly, according to health officials. One of the people who fell ill is in a local hospital. Health officials have released few details about the infected individuals, citing confidentiality. The three cases are still under investigation, according to Dr. Anne Bailowitz, medical director for Environmental Health and Emergency Programs at the City Health Department.

A second student at Folger McKinsey Elementary School in Severna Park has come down with what is probably the swine flu, state health officials said Saturday. That student apparently caught the infection by riding the school bus with a neighbor, a 7-year-old boy whose suspected case of the flu led Gov. Martin O'Malley on Friday to close the school - and three others where students appear to have been sickened. A fifth school is also being closed, officials said Saturday, this one because a teacher at University Park Elementary School in Prince George's County has a likely case of the swine flu. In all, state health officials on Saturday announced four new probable cases of the infection - a Harford County man, an Anne Arundel County woman, the student and the teacher - bringing to 15 the number of probable cases in Maryland.

Federal health authorities, busily assessing the scope of the swine flu outbreak, are preparing in case a vaccine is needed to stem the spread of the disease that has sickened more than 100 in the United States and killed a 22-month-old boy in Texas. The development of a vaccine is a long, painstaking, fairly crude process that typically involves growing the virus in millions of chicken eggs. It would be months before the first person could be inoculated. Still, scientists with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are working with vaccine makers to begin the process and in coming weeks make the call: Should vaccine production be ramped up in time for the traditional flu season this fall?

Officials advised Monday against most travel to Mexico, the center of an outbreak of swine flu suspected of killing almost 150 people there and sickening at least 50 through its spread to the United States. The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said cases of the virus in the U.S. have been mild - none has been reported in Maryland - but warned that more serious cases could emerge. "I wouldn't rest on the fact that we have only seen cases in this country that are less severe," Dr. Richard Besser told reporters.

As Mexico City closed schools and began taking other measures to contain the spread of a swine flu outbreak that might have infected hundreds of people and killed as many as 60, U.S. officials said Friday they had found one new case in San Diego, bringing the total number of U.S. cases to eight. The most recent victim, a child, has recovered fully - as did all of the other seven victims - said Dr. Richard Besser, acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Six of the eight U.S. cases occurred in California's San Diego and Imperial counties and two in Guadeloupe County, Texas.

Health officials said Monday that they are trying to contain Maryland's first measles outbreak since 2001, after a fourth case was diagnosed in Montgomery County. Since February, three adults and a baby have developed measles, a highly infectious viral disease characterized by a red skin rash. Most Americans are immunized against measles, which has largely disappeared in the U.S. But last year, the number of cases doubled throughout the nation, which health officials attributed mostly to people who traveled overseas and may not be inoculated or have poor immune systems.

So what if your faithful PC should turn against you? Your Facebook is posting pornography. Your Twitter followers are being urged to advocate for the violent overthrow of the government, and your bank account's online bill pay is transferring large amounts from your savings to total strangers. Can't happen, you say? Think again. A computer virus called the Conficker worm capable of all of that and more is out there lurking. It has invaded more than 12 million computers around the world and continues to infect more every day. Last week, an army of security experts working to counter Conficker heaved a collective sigh of relief when many of the infected computers successfully executed a command to phone home but the worm took no further action.