High Risk

The federal government Friday called for all baby boomers to be tested for hepatitis C, which kills more Americans each year than AIDS and is the leading reason for liver transplants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made the recommendation to find hundreds of thousands of people who don't realize that they have the infection, which greatly increases their chances of developing cirrhosis and liver cancer. The hepatitis C virus is transmitted by blood, usually through intravenous drug use or transfusions.

In rejecting PSA screening for prostate cancer, an influential federal panel has chipped a cornerstone of preventive medicine, declaring that it's not always best to catch cancer as early as possible. "At best, PSA screening may help only 1 man in 1,000 avoid death from prostate cancer," the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said Monday. "Most prostate cancers found by PSA screening are slow growing, not life threatening, and will not cause a man any harm during his lifetime.

Residents who live near 205 pollution-spewing industrial plants in 37 states may face more than a 1-in-1,000 chance of getting cancer from the emissions - far above the risk level regarded as acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency, according to preliminary government data released by Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.). However, EPA Administrator William K. Reilly warned that estimates for any particular plant or location might be severely flawed because the data were not intended to assess public-health risks at individual sites.

An eight-month federal study of the danger posed by pollution in Chester has concluded that the health risks caused by environmental hazards are unacceptably high for virtually all residents. The Environmental Protection Agency study, which agency officials called the first of its kind in the United States, set about in early April to assess as many environmental risk factors to the population as possible. It was commissioned because of a clustering of environmentally hazardous industries in Chester and because of concerns that Chester's residents were the victims of "environmental racism.

My grandmother celebrated her 97th birthday this March. That's a pretty good accomplishment, but there are plenty of people who live until their 90s or even older. How many, though, have undergone and survived double-bypass heart surgery at age 95? Needless to say, she's a very strong woman. And she was fortunate to have doctors who believed in her strength and who weren't forced to assume that this high-risk operation wasn't worth doing or wasn't economically feasible merely because of her age. It's easy to talk about Medicare cuts or rationed health care when it's in the abstract.

Pennsylvania's Insurance Department announced Wednesday that it had submitted a plan to achieve one of the provisions of the new national health-overhaul legislation: creation of a special insurance program for people who can't buy insurance because they're already sick. People with preexisting conditions such as heart disease, cancer, or major mental illness would be able to buy into the proposed high-risk insurance pool for about what healthy people would pay, up to $5,616 a year. The problem is that those payments, plus $160 million in federal funding through 2013, can provide insurance for only about 5,100 people in a state where 800,000 are uninsured.

The United Nations World Health Organization has begun testing possible HIV vaccines, but partly because the first trials are in Thailand, the program is controversial. The need for a vaccine is especially pressing since the AIDS epidemic is exploding in many of the world's poorest nations. Yet many people say that testing vaccines in poor nations is unethical. They are wrong. Many of us still think of acquired immune deficiency syndrome as somehow peculiarly an American disease.

The AIDS scare is back. This time it threatens to undo a decade of scientific investigation, public education, and social understanding. Recent reports of physicians with acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), of potential transfer of virus to patients, and legislative fiat by the U.S. Senate to prevent and make criminal such transmission, have brought AIDS back into the public forum. These reports, however, serve less to educate than to obfuscate and tend more to promote fear than to inform.

He's just 2 1/2 inches long, with little fingers and a heartbeat that flickers on the ultrasound screen. He flip-flops around in his mother's womb, such a tiny being that she can't feel his movement. Yet, Virginia Connolly, 35, eagerly tracks her son's every turn. With the black and white pictures of the ultrasound screen, she quips, he'll have a photo album started even before birth. Through a procedure available in Chester County only at the Chester County Hospital, and performed by a team from the Pennsylvania Hospital, Connolly was reassured early in her pregnancy that her son would be born without genetic abnormalities.

The first time Ginny and Denny Marshall saw Maria, she was screaming in the arms of a woman she barely knew, her mother, in a dim Romanian living room. It was 11 o'clock at night on the last Thursday of April 1991, and the Marshalls, who live in Chester County, had gone to Romanian court that morning and agreed, in a language they didn't fully understand, to adopt a 26-month- old girl who had spent all but two months of her life in an orphanage. They knew nothing else about her. So here she was, a tiny, dirty child with a runny nose, a shaved head, three layers of clothing, a lump on her forehead, and eyes that aimed in different directions.

  An $80 million national research plan to attack Alzheimer's, a mind-robbing malady that may affect as many as 16 million Americans by 2050, will start this year with U.S.-sponsored studies on ways to prevent the disease in high-risk people and treat it with an insulin nasal spray. The National Institutes of Health will spend $7.9 million researching the spray and $16 million on the first study to focus on growth of the disease in high-risk patients, according to a statement today by Department of Health and Human Services.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. - Powerful storms stretching from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes wrecked several Indiana towns and killed at least 20 people Friday as the system tore roofs off schools and homes, flattened a fire station, flipped over tractor-trailers, and damaged a maximum-security prison. It was the second deadly tornado outbreak this week. Authorities reported 14 deaths in southern Indiana, where Marysville was leveled and nearby Henryville also sustained extreme damage.

When casino mogul Sheldon Adelson wrote a $5 million check this month to a super PAC backing his close friend Newt Gingrich, it was the largest donation the executive had ever made to a candidate in an election cycle. Aides close to the 78-year-old billionaire, whose company, Las Vegas Sands Corp., owns the Sands Bethlehem Casino Resort, about an hour's drive from Philadelphia, say the contribution reflects Adelson's penchant for making high-risk bets - with high payoff. It also showcases the growing influence of super PACs on the presidential campaign.

A glass of red wine can warm the heart on a chilly fall evening, and some data show it will also improve your cardiovascular health. But women who take one sip may no longer deserve to wear that pink ribbon. Even moderate drinkers are encouraging the enemy - breast cancer - at least according to the latest news from the Journal of the American Medical Association. A recent study shows that even one drink a day can raise a woman's risk by 15 percent. The findings come from a large study that followed 105,986 nurses over 28 years.

Poverty, long known to be a major factor behind the HIV epidemic in urban areas, is such a powerful force that income and related measures are better predictors of who will get infected than whether a person exchanges sex for money, according to a new federal study of heterosexuals in 24 cities. The study, published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was too small to break out findings on Philadelphia or the other cities. But it helps explain why Philadelphia has some of the highest HIV rates in the country, as Philadelphia is among the most impoverished of big cities.

THE CENTER FOR Public Integrity is starting an ambitious national project - believed to be the first of its kind - to identify risks of public corruption in each state based on laws on the books and how they're enforced. Pennsylvania will show itself to be at very high risk indeed. Right now we've got two former legislative leaders (Democrats Mike Veon and Vince Fumo) in prison; one former legislative leader (Republican Jane Orie) on trial; and two former legislative leaders (Republican John Perzel and Democrat Bill DeWeese)

An outbreak of salmonella poisoning that has sickened hundreds of people who ate bad eggs should prompt the Senate to stop sitting on legislation to give the Food and Drug Administration more clout. But instead of its watered-down version that has been collecting dust, the Senate should adopt a House bill passed a year ago. More than 1,300 recent salmonella cases have been linked to contaminated eggs. FDA officials say those illnesses, and the subsequent voluntary recall of a half-billion eggs, might have been avoided if it had the power to inspect agribusinesses before an outbreak and to order product recalls when necessary.

Four years after industry officials persuaded Congress and the Department of Homeland Security to accept watered-down regulations on securing chemical plants from terrorists, they're urging federal officials to once again kick the can down the road. One proposal in the Senate would even renew these flawed rules for five more years. That's an imprudent strategy, though, for safeguarding millions of Americans from the risks posed by hundreds of plants where dangerous chemicals are processed or in use. Plant safety rules that will expire in October simply aren't doing the job - which is why Congress must strengthen them now. For instance, even the mandated government inspection of high-risk facilities lags far behind schedule.

Pennsylvania's Insurance Department announced Wednesday that it had submitted a plan to achieve one of the provisions of the new national health-overhaul legislation: creation of a special insurance program for people who can't buy insurance because they're already sick. People with preexisting conditions such as heart disease, cancer, or major mental illness would be able to buy into the proposed high-risk insurance pool for about what healthy people would pay, up to $5,616 a year. The problem is that those payments, plus $160 million in federal funding through 2013, can provide insurance for only about 5,100 people in a state where 800,000 are uninsured.

Paula Creamer fought throughout the front nine yesterday to keep her golf game together while the wind strengthened and the conditions at Saucon Valley Country Club got tougher during Round 3 of the U.S. Women's Open. Then she arrived at the par-4 10th hole, where U.S. Golf Association officials had moved up the tee to 253 yards to entice players to go for the green. One triple-bogey 7 later, Creamer had all but waved goodbye to her hopes of winning her first career major championship.