United States Health

Last fall, shortly after Adm. James D. Watkins was asked to lead the embattled presidential AIDS commission, one of its members, New York cancer specialist Burton Lee, was confronted by several leaders of New York City's gay community, hard hit by the epidemic. They were very upset. "My God, a military man," Lee recalled them saying. "How are we going to get any breaks from a guy like this?"

As many as 1 million Americans are now living with HIV infections and about half are undiagnosed or untreated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said here Monday. AIDS death rates in the U.S. have declined sharply because of successful therapies. As recently as 1996, the last year before new combinations of drugs began prolonging survival, there were 38,025 AIDS deaths reported. By 2000, 15,245 people died.

Billie Raney was 21 when she stood on the sidewalk with her three grown sisters, watching morticians drag their mother out of the family home, still wrapped in the sheets in which she had succumbed to smallpox. Lillian Barber, then 43, was the only person to die in the last smallpox outbreak in the United States, which infected eight known victims in the Rio Grande Valley in 1949. The survivors are now retired pastors, tractor salesmen, grandmothers and grandfathers.

Deborah Willhite, who helped formulate the U.S. Postal Service's response to last fall's anthrax attacks, stopped taking her antibiotics a full two weeks before her 60-day prescription ended. Willhite, an agency senior vice president deemed at risk for anthrax exposure, couldn't stand the vomiting, an occasional side effect of the medication. The last straw was throwing up in a store parking lot while she was loading packages into her car.

Federal health officials recommended Thursday that the government abandon plans to conduct a nationwide survey to determine the extent of AIDS infection in the United States. Health officials currently estimate that between 1 million and 1.5 million Americans are infected with the human immunodeficiency virus. The goal of the nationwide survey, first proposed by the Ronald Reagan Administration in 1987, would be to obtain a more accurate projection.

Measles, once a common rite of passage for U.S. children, has all but been wiped out in this country, federal health officials announced Thursday. In 1998, there were only 100 cases reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most of them believed to have originated outside the United States.

For the first time in nearly 20 years, the incidence of all cancers combined--and most of the leading types of cancer--declined from 1990 to 1995 in the United States, health officials announced Thursday. Death rates from the disease also decreased. The drop in the rate of new cases represents a reversal of a discouraging trend of escalating cancer incidence over nearly two decades, while the decline in the death rate sustains a turnaround noted for the first time last year.

For all of this century, coronary heart disease has far exceeded cancer as the leading cause of death in the United States. But uneven success in reducing mortality from each of the diseases is causing researchers to speculate that cancer will replace heart disease as the top killer of Americans sometime around the year 2000. Forty years ago, the death rate for coronary heart disease was more than double that of cancer.

Americans are eating too much animal fat and government regulations make it difficult for the food industry to market leaner and more healthful meats and dairy products, a scientific panel said last week. Although consumption of animal fat has gone down, many Americans still are eating their way to poor health with too much cholesterol, fatty acids and salt, and not enough foods that provide the needed calcium and iron, said a report by a committee of the National Research Council.

The federal government and the American Foundation for AIDS Research announced Monday that they will jointly sponsor a massive, long-term study to see how AIDS infection progresses in various populations. "The scope of this effort is unparalleled," Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan said in a statement. "The study will result in the most comprehensive collection of information on HIV-infected persons amassed in the history of the AIDS epidemic."

Not enough elderly Americans are being screened for colon cancer, even though Medicare often picks up most of the costs, according to critics asking Congress to expand coverage. The American Cancer Society estimates that colon cancer will kill 48,000 people this year in the United States, more than any other cancer except lung cancer.

Billie Raney was 21 when she stood on the sidewalk with her three grown sisters, watching morticians drag their mother out of the family home, still wrapped in the sheets in which she had succumbed to smallpox. Lillian Barber, then 43, was the only person to die in the last smallpox outbreak in the United States, which infected eight known victims in the Rio Grande Valley in 1949. The survivors are now retired pastors, tractor salesmen, grandmothers and grandfathers.

The U.S. Agriculture Department said Friday that a new study found little risk of "mad cow" disease turning up in American cattle, but as a precaution the government plans to test more cattle and ban the use of spinal column material in processed meat. Harvard University researchers said in a 550-page report that the United States was "extremely unlikely" to suffer an outbreak of the deadly disease, also known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), because of strict U.S. trade restrictions.

Surfing the Internet or listening to talk radio in recent days, you might get the idea that herbs, homeopathy and other alternative health remedies can prevent and cure anthrax infection. A guest on Howard Stern's talk-radio show last week touted garlic and oil of oregano as natural ways to ward off and cure anthrax.

Thousands of dead birds infected with the West Nile virus have fallen from the sky across 14 states in the South and Midwest in recent months, evidence that the mosquito-borne disease is quickly marching westward.

As the anthrax scare unfolds, America's national doctor has been largely out of sight, unable to reassure a jittery public about the health threat. Even as Surgeon General David Satcher steps up appearances on talk shows and at news conferences, some health experts say it is too little too late. The Bush administration, in its efforts to contain the escalating crisis, has virtually ignored its lame-duck surgeon general. In part, that's because Satcher is a Clinton administration holdover.

As do many HIV-positive people, Elena Monica does all she can to maintain her health and avoid the disease's symptoms. She sees a conventional medical doctor who checks her blood and advises her. But she also undergoes oxygen therapy, an unproven remedy that involves intramuscular injections of pure liquid oxygen. And she practices chiqong , a form of Chinese meditation.

Americans born in 1984 had an average life expectancy at birth of 74.7 years, a gain of nearly three years in a decade, and women were expected to live seven years longer than men, the government reported Monday. The outlook was best for white females and worst for black males. People who were 65 in 1984 had an additional life expectancy of 16.8 years on the average, an improvement of more than a year over the previous 10 years, says an annual report on the nation's health statistics.

It's hard to catch anthrax. Even when people are exposed to the bacterium, conditions must be just right for infection to take hold. In part because of that, public health officials say people have little reason to worry that they will catch the infection, despite the current investigation in Florida of two cases of anthrax exposure. "Right now, with two cases, I wouldn't be pushing the panic button," said Raymond Zilinskas, a senior scientist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Americans are healthier than they were 25 years ago, and a government report offers some examples: longer life expectancy, better infant survival rates, fewer smokers, less hypertension and lower cholesterol levels. But in small-town America, the health news is far from good, said an annual report released Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.