Immune System

Two pints of bone marrow from a California donor whose tissue is genetically similar to that of a Bucks County leukemia victim at Hahnemann University Hospital were flown here and given to the woman last night in a last-resort attempt to cure her disease. The patient, Deborah Kelly of Levittown, beat 20,000-1 odds when her doctors located an unidentified donor in San Francisco whose bone marrow is genetically similar, according to physicians. That genetic similarity is so statistically rare that it has never happened in the 13-year history of bone-marrow transplantation therapy in this area, Hahnemann doctors said.

Deaths from acquired immune deficiency syndrome have passed the 20,000 mark in the United States, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported yesterday. It said that by last Monday, the number of deaths from AIDS had reached 20,342. More than 38,000 people in the United States have been diagnosed as having the disease. So far, almost three-quarters of the victims have been homosexual or bisexual men, including some who also were intravenous drug users. One in six has been an intravenous drug user who was not homosexual.

Frogs with three legs - natural phenomenon or the result of pollution? Both forces may be at work, according to a study published yesterday by researchers at Pennsylvania State University. It is a debate that has raged for more than a decade, ever since schoolchildren and naturalists began finding what seemed to be increased numbers of frogs with grotesque deformities. Both environmental groups and conservative think-tanks have entered the fray - the former blaming pesticides and other human influence, the latter warning against a sky-is-falling mentality, noting that deformed frogs have been found since the 1700s.

Hatboro-Horsham's John Kenny is not only one of the best distance swimmers in the area, he is also one of the most determined, competitive and courageous. Last year, the youngster stepped out of a sickbed to swim the 500-yard freestyle at Penn during the PIAA District 1 Class AAA championships. Seeded first in the event, the weakened junior finished sixth in 4 minutes, 47 seconds and barely qualified for the state meet, which was his goal. Many swimmers perform while sick, but not with a 105-degree fever and a weight loss of between 10 and 12 pounds, as Kenny did. For a week before the district meet on March 1, he lay in bed as a result of the Epstein-Barr virus, which causes infectious mononucleosis.

EMOTIONS AND CHOLESTEROL Men, repressing negative emotions may give you high cholesterol. That's according to a report in Psychology Today on a study that found that "truly low anxious" men, who are honest with themselves and others about experiencing anxiety, had fairly low total cholesterol levels. But those who tend to "put on a happy face but have trouble acknowledging their negative emotions" averaged a whopping 40 points higher. HEARING AID For those who suffer from nerve, or inner ear, deafness, a high-price, high-tech hearing device is about to come on the market.

It was supposed to have been Robert and Anne Gates Yarnall's dream house, but it became Anne's worst nightmare. The house in Upper Roxborough, with its landmark three-story atrium, made her sick, so sick that she exiled herself for a whole year to the studio she had once used for her painting while she waited to move to a more environmentally friendly house. Yarnall had fallen victim to multiple chemical sensitivity, meaning that just about everything around her made her sick - from the kerosene-based ink used in newspapers, to the mold spores on the pages of books, to the outside air laden with automobile exhausts, to the fragrance designed to mask the soapy odor of dishwashing detergent.

Problems in the immune system related to diseases that cause the body to attack itself, such as arthritis and lupus, may be to blame for many cases of infertility, a researcher said yesterday. Many women prone to fertility problems had a significantly higher incidence of abnormal factors in the blood called autoimmune antibodies than occur in other women, researchers at Chicago's Mount Sinai Medical Center found. In another report on infertility, researchers said yesterday that a study of three women from the same family suggests that an abnormality in the sex chromosome may lead to premature menopause.

OK. It didn't work. But don't stop now. In fact, let's work twice as hard. Those are the take-away lessons from the Sept. 21 announcement that a prototype AIDS vaccine being tested by Merck had failed in the second of three phases of testing needed for market approval. Merck did the right thing: It stopped the trials as soon as its scientists saw people weren't benefitting. But it's a major blow to hopes that Merck had a hot lead, and to hopes for a workable AIDS vaccine in the foreseeable future.

Molly Sharkey, a 14-year-old Cherry Hill girl stricken with leukemia, received her long-awaited infusion of bone marrow yesterday, minutes after it was flown in from London and rushed to her bedside in Milwaukee. The life-saving transplant was a simple two-hour procedure, but a tough test still lies ahead for the teenager, a spokeswoman for the Medical College of Wisconsin said yesterday. "She's as well as can be expected," Toranj Marphetia said. "The problems now are to watch for infection and things like that.

Until January, AIDS books filled only one shelf at the bookstore Giovanni's Room. Today, they occupy seven shelves - an entire bookcase - with more than 70 titles. The increased space devoted to AIDS books at the store at 12th and Pine Streets, which caters largely to homosexual men and women, reflects what editors and publicity directors of several publishing houses describe as an AIDS publishing boom. "There are tons of AIDS books," said Dayna Macy, publicity director of Celestial Arts, a publishing company in Berkeley, Calif.