Walter Reed

WASHINGTON -- Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced plans yesterday to form an independent review group to examine Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals. The announcement comes in the wake of reports indicating that seriously injured soldiers had been entangled in a bureaucratic morass and given substandard outpatient housing at Walter Reed. The review ordered by Gates will focus on rehabilitative care and administrative procedures at Walter Reed and at Bethesda Naval Medical Center.

Etta L. Ryden, a retired Army nurse who served in three wars, died of heart failure Feb. 3 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. The former Frederick resident was 92. She was born and raised in Rochester, N.Y., and moved with her family to Catonsville in the 1930s. She attended the University of Iowa and graduated from Highland Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., with a certified nursing degree in 1942. She earned a bachelor's degree in nursing from the Johns Hopkins University in 1949.

It's one of the rarest infectious diseases, affecting an average of only 100 babies a year in the United States, but infant botulism infected two babies living on the same street at Fort Meade in recent months - puzzling researchers. Clusters of the illness are not unprecedented, experts say, and the ubiquity of the bacterial spores that cause infant botulism makes isolating one source almost impossible. That is especially true in this case, where the military base also happens to be an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site.

ST. MICHAELS -- The sun was rising in a ribbon of crimson over the Choptank River as Barry Yancosek lugged a veteran's wheelchair backward through sand and spartina grass along the shore. Yancosek, a therapist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, helped Chad Kueser, who lost both legs in the Iraq war, hide behind camouflage netting with a shotgun. Next to him, three other servicemen with prosthetic or disabled arms hunkered down into a duck blind. During a morning of biting wind and numbing cold, they felt their spirits lifted by camaraderie and breathtaking scenery.

The mix of fresh air, faux multicolored leis, miniature surfboards and an occasional green metallic grass skirt might not have been Hawaii, but it was just what Army Spc. Bryant Jacobs needed after being cooped up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for almost two years. Jacobs, a 25-year-old from Salt Lake City, has been recovering at the medical center's Mologne House - an outpatient hotel for soldiers and their families - since being injured in a roadside bombing in Iraq on Dec. 3, 2004.

Red Cross seeks blood donors The Red Cross says that after the July 4 holiday, blood donations have fallen to a critical level, and the community blood supply is not adequate for the needs of hospitals. In response, the Greater Chesapeake and Potomac Region of the Red Cross is urging eligible whole blood donors to schedule an appointment to give blood. Donors must be in good health, at least 17 (16 with written parental consent) and weigh at least 110 pounds. They must not have received a tattoo within the past year and not have donated whole blood in the past 56 days.

Worker rescued from trench Anne Arundel County emergency crews rescued a construction worker yesterday who injured his back after falling into a trench at a fiber optic cable work site in Annapolis. The accident occurred about 11:30 a.m. after the worker fell into a hole that was about 7 feet square and 7 feet deep, said Lt. Frank Fennell of the Anne Arundel County Fire Department. It occurred near the eastbound ramp to U.S. 50 off Route 2 and West Street. The 21-year-old told rescuers he heard his back snap when he landed in the pit, which had been dug to install a concrete cable junction box, Fennell said.

A federal commission voted yesterday to move Washington's historic Walter Reed Army Medical Center and nearly 1,900 jobs to Bethesda, part of a sweeping military realignment that would expand a national center for medical treatment and research in Maryland. The decision by the Base Closure and Realignment Commission paves the way for building another hospital on the campus of the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. The two facilities would merge into an expanded, 340-bed hospital to be called Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in honor of the nearly century-old Army hospital.

Maryland will learn over the next four days whether four years of lobbying to bring thousands of high-paying defense jobs to the state have paid off. And the most crucial day is likely to be today, when the federal commission that controls the fate of a national military realignment is scheduled to vote on proposals that would affect Fort Meade and Aberdeen Proving Ground. After months of hearings across the country on recommendations to close or consolidate more than 60 U.S. bases, the nine members of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission will meet this morning at a hotel in Crystal City, Va., to begin deciding what will be cut. At stake for Maryland is whether the commission will adopt proposals the Pentagon made in May that would bring to Maryland at least 6,600 defense jobs - more than any state except Georgia.

WASHINGTON - The paradox of war is that the fittest risk becoming the most disabled. The public response to this is itself tragically ironic. Those who prepare for war are public investments; their bodies are war machines, idealized and adulated. Yet those who return from war are receiving neither the public investment nor support they deserve. The Bush administration, for one, is in something of denial. President Bush, in his speech at Fort Bragg, N.C., last month, implied that the best way to honor all those who have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan is to complete the mission.