Environmental Health

The couple met while working in entry-level positions at the Burlington County Health Department in the early 1980s, and the office romance led to marriage. He was eventually promoted to an important administrative position, supervising 30 employees in the environmental health section. But in recent days, Brenda and Frank Ripoli Jr. had separated, and on Thursday, when Brenda returned to the Medford Township home they had shared to pack her belongings, Frank shot and killed her, investigators said yesterday.

Children could be the biggest losers in a state plan to scrap regulations designed to protect schools from environmental problems, county health officials said. The Department of Environmental Protection is trying to repeal its school regulations, which have been on the books for 25 years. The DEP would continue to cover areas such as drinking water, sewage facilities, and solid-waste disposal. If all goes according to the DEP's plans, it will stop monitoring building safety, rodent control, garbage collection, and heating and ventilation in about six months.

Children who have questions on personal health now have another resource: BAM! (Body and Mind), a new Web site created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. BAM! features information on topics such as physical fitness and asthma, designed to be kid-friendly in an interactive way. Its goal is to encourage healthy lifestyles and prevent risky behaviors such as violence, smoking, drinking and doing drugs, CDC spokeswoman Suzanne Gates said. Healthy lifestyles, such as physical activity and good nutrition and mental health, are emphasized on the Web site to prevent chronic diseases such as diabetes or heart disease later in life, Gates said.

Dear Joyce: I have a master's degree in public health acquired before I raised a family. I am thinking about updating my skills with additional courses, or even acquiring a doctorate. What's on the horizon for epidemiology? Public health practitioners work chiefly for government agencies - federal, state and local - and for non-profit organizations. They are the health troops who fight to keep disease from overwhelming a community or nation. For those with a scientific bent and an inclination to protect people, the public health field is attractive - more than a quarter-million people in the primary work force find it so, and 20 percent of these have graduate training.

One of the finest passages in the Pennsylvania Constitution is this simple, elegant admonition: "The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and aesthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania's public natural resources are the common property of all people, including generations yet to come. " But the language in this passage has not always been honored by the state. The awful legacy of Pennsylvania's coal mining is just one example of the commonwealth's failure to be the best steward of the land and the water.

The New Jersey Department of Health will present the results of a long-term study of the health effects of the Lipari Landfill area on Thursday at 7 p.m. at Memorial Elementary School on Hudson Avenue. In the study - which has taken 2 1/2 years to complete - the department looked at factors such as birth weights, birth defects and spontaneous abortions, borough Councilman Doug Stuart said. The report will also present the cancer registry, a study using information from 1980 to 1984 that tracked cancers from the landfill area to Pitman, Glassboro and Mantua and Harrison Townships.

It's going to take more than a couple of aspirin and a phone call in the morning to cure New Jersey's public-health ills. In its first "health report card," the Medical Society of New Jersey yesterday gave public and private agencies in the state a "C" average on how they handle elder care, violence, children's health, and other pressing public-health issues. "It's no secret that New Jersey has a lot of major-league problems," said Neil Weisfeld, deputy executive director of the society, which represents 9,500 doctors in New Jersey.

A conference devoted to land-use issues in Chester County was virtually ignored by local municipal officials, according to conference organizers. Although notice of the all-day affair held Saturday in Lionville was mailed to all 73 municipalities, only 20 of the more than 130 people who attended registered as municipal representatives. The conference was hosted by the Chester County Leagues of Women Voters, as well as by the Chester County Planning Commission, the Brandywine Conservancy and the Brandywine Valley Association.

Bugs in wells can cause problems, especially earwigs.Fresh from a visit to the local garbage can, earwigs, attracted to a damp and dark well, can squeeze under a well's cap and pollute the water with their droppings. Their bodies also do pollute if they fall to the bottom and drown. But new regulations in Chester County aim to provide a partial solution to the earwig problem by requiring insect-resistant caps on all new wells or those opened for repairs. "In the past, we used to write this bacterial contamination off to things we can't control," said Ralph DeFazio, environmental health supervisor for the Chester County Health Department.

Under normal conditions, Kelly Raum spends her workday looking for rats in restaurants. These days, she's on a hunt for mosquitoes, particularly the Culex pipiens variety, the common Northern house mosquito. It is this species that carries the West Nile virus, which has been known to cause fatal cases of encephalitis in humans. Last week, Raum, an environmental health specialist with the Chester County Health Department, spotted mosquito larvae in a pool of stagnant water behind the Phoenixville sewage treatment plant.