[TexKat]

Maryland Officials Investigate Suspected Case of Avian Flu

Saturday March 06, 2004 2:41pm

Pocomoke City (AP) - Maryland officials are investigating a suspected case of avian influenza at a farm near Pocomoke City in Worcester County.

WBOC-TV first reported on the suspicious case, which officials learned of last night.

Sue duPont, a spokeswoman for the Maryland Agriculture (website - news) Department, says tests are being run Saturday on a sample at a USDA laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

She says officials hope to have results on the sample by this evening.

Officials have tested birds on 1900 farms in Maryland, Virginia and Delaware since the disease was discovered on two Delaware farms.

duPont says there have been other cases of suspected avian flu in Delaware, but this is the first in Maryland. The other suspected cases turned out not to be the flu.

[TexKat]

Hospital Officials Angered by HIV Hoax Letter

Friday March 05, 2004 7:50am

Arlington, Va. (AP) - Officials at Virginia Hospital Center in Arlington are angry at what they're calling a cruel hoax being made in the hospital's name.

They say letters on what looks like the hospital's letterhead have been sent to people from Washington to Richmond, warning that someone the recipient had sex with has tested positive for HIV. The letter claims to be a notification from an HIV testing service associated with the hospital.

But hospital President Jim Cole says no such service exists and the hospital never sends out such letters. He says whoever wrote them is trying to cause distress to the recipient or to damage the hospital's reputation.

Arlington police are investigating and say the person who sent the letters could face criminal charges.

[JustPiper]

Avian Flu Found on Maryland Chicken Farm

By Associated Press

March 7, 2004, 12:39 AM EST

POCOMOKE CITY, Md. -- A case of Avian flu has been found at a commercial chicken farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore, the U.S. agriculture department said.

It is the same strain, H7, found last month in two flocks in Delaware, but officials said there was no known connection with the cases in the two states.

The outbreak is at a Pokomoke City farm with about 118,000 6-week-old broiler chickens. Officials quarantined the farm Friday evening, Maryland Agriculture Secretary Lewis R. Riley said in a news release. The birds will be destroyed Sunday morning and their remains kept in the chicken houses where they are killed.

Officials said 210,000 chickens on a nearby farm under the same ownership also would be destroyed because of "shared personnel and equipment."

But they said they would keep under observation some week-old birds on a third property owned by the same farmer.

Also, the state agriculture department quarantined 71 farms in a six-mile radius of the farm where the case was found. There are approximately 1,100 poultry farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Poultry in Maryland accounted for $441 million of the state's $1.4 billion agriculture industry in 2002.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-bird-flu-maryland,0,6019546,print.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines