Disease

Dan Kilby, a standout athlete at Oxford who later became varsity soccer coach and junior varsity basketball coach at his alma mater, says his sports background helped him battle Hodgkin's disease when he first was diagnosed with the disease last year. "I've always had a competitive edge, and I think that helped with the early treatments," said Kilby. "After high school I kept in good physical condition by running and playing in adult leagues so I was not run down. But that chemotherapy eventually knocks you out. " Kilby, who played soccer, basketball and baseball for the Hornets, was scheduled to undergo his final chemotherapy treatment yesterday.

Neil Ringer was 12 when his mother was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. Though he was familiar with the baseball great, the disease, formally known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, meant nothing to Ringer - until he was told that the disease would eventually kill his mother. "I remember being upset that you would only have three years to live," Ringer told his mother, Shirley, during an interview at their home last week - more than seven years after the diagnosis. Shirley Ringer has defied the odds.

Area doctors are reporting an increase in hand-foot-and-mouth disease, a viral infection characterized by small blisters in those parts of the body. The disease, which is not considered dangerous, strikes hundreds of Philadelphia area children every summer. Some pediatricians say they have been seeing two or three cases a day. "It's the equivalent of the common cold but not as irritating," said Margaret Fisher, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children.

He looked a little pale at times during his recent crusade in Philadelphia, and moved a bit slower than his old animated self, but there was nothing to suggest that the Rev. Billy Graham has Parkinson's disease. But the news was confirmed yesterday by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Organization in Minneapolis after a story appeared in yesterday's Charlotte (N.C.) Observer. Ken Garfield, the newspaper's religion writer, said he recently received a tip that Graham had the disease, and had told several organizers of the Philadelphia crusade on June 20. One was Common Pleas Court Judge Nelson Diaz, who did not return calls from the Daily News, but did speak with the Observer.

In the wake of an outbreak of St. Louis encephalitis that has killed three people in New York City, Philadelphia officials are stepping up efforts to control mosquitoes, which can carry the disease. Each year, the city treats standing water to kill mosquito larvae during the summer. This year, it is doing a second round of treatments in the city's thousands of sewer inlets and catch basins "just to be on the safe side," said Randall Hirschhorn, director of environmental health services for the Philadelphia health department.

Harriet Berkey can now lift a half-gallon jug of milk. She also can stand on the tips of her toes and reach for items without losing her balance. As mundane as both activities might seem, Berkey, 56, of Evesham, has spent 1 1/2 years attending strength classes at the Mount Laurel branch of the Family Y of Burlington County to help her maintain her strength and keep her balance while fighting the effects of multiple sclerosis. "When I left work, I knew that I'd have to do something to keep myself moving because if you don't use it, you lose it," said Berkey, a former nurse anesthetist who was diagnosed with the disease about two years ago after she began having trouble maintaining her balance.

Cherry Hill school nurse Ann Marie Duffy, speaking at a recent school district forum about AIDS, told the story of her personal experience with a first grader to emphasize why early AIDS education is critical. "I asked a class of first graders if anyone could tell me what germs were," said Duffy, the school nurse at the Sharp School. "And the little girl said, 'Yes, germs are AIDS.' " "What we all have to realize," she continued, "is that most young children have heard about AIDS either from television, peers or home talk.

Terrorism came to Philadelphia and Chester County yesterday. Or at least authorities acted like it had. In an exercise that was more than a year in planning, the FBI and other law-enforcement agencies said, they conducted an "agroterrorism" test to see how the region might react to introduction of a "foreign animal disease" in livestock. The test was deemed a success. "The whole objective is to learn how to minimize the impact of a potential or actual outbreak," said Jerri Williams, an FBI spokeswoman.

Toward the end of his 34-year tenure as pastor of Christ Baptist Church, the Rev. John Green started a little "joke" before the service. As parishioners filed into the simple, red-brick church in North Philadelphia, Green would good-naturedly ask each one, "And your name is?" The congregation found it amusing. "People would laugh and laugh," Green's wife, Mary, said. She realizes now that the question was a clever way for her gregarious husband, who was only 62, to hide the truth: He'd known these people for decades and he had forgotten their names.

When he entered Swarthmore College in 1986, Bill Martin did not plan to become a psychology major, let alone get heavily involved with laboratory experiments that might eventually aid in the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Martin started out majoring in political science, with an eye toward law school. And he very well might have followed that course if he had been able to sign up for a particular class during his freshman year. "By the time I went to register, it was closed out," said Martin, a senior running back in football and the team's leading rusher this season.