Nation, World Briefs: Contamination fear spurs recall of infant vaccines

Published 10:58 pm Wednesday, December 12, 2007

ATLANTA — More than a million doses of a common vaccine given to babies as young as 2 months were being recalled Wednesday because of contamination risks, but the top U.S. health official said it was not a health threat. The recall is for 1.2 million doses of the Merck &Co. vaccine for Hib, which protects against meningitis, pneumonia and other serious infections, and a combination vaccine for Hib and hepatitis B. The vaccine is recommended for all children under 5 and is usually given in a three-shot series, starting at two months.

Nebraska: It’s Boys Town again

It’s a boys’ club again — at least in name. Seven years after changing its name to Girls and Boys Town, the iconic home for wayward children has dropped “Girls” from its name. The switch stems not from any change in mission, but from the fact that the longer name never caught on with many people, a Boys Town spokesman said Wednesday. He added that the longer name did help get out the message that the organization cares for girls as well as boys. It’s no longer necessary to spell that out in the name, he said, though he said the group’s new logo features a boy carrying a girl on his back.

N.H.: Same-sex group wedding

Same-sex couples plan to celebrate New Hampshire’s new civil unions law by holding a midnight group ceremony as soon as the law takes effect on Jan. 1. Democratic state Rep. Gail Morrison, a supporter of the civil unions bill that passed earlier this year, announced Wednesday she is organizing the group ceremony to take place at midnight on the Statehouse steps. Morrison and co-organizer Jen Major say couples who have previously obtained licenses from town and city clerks and want to participate can sign up beginning at 11 p.m. Dec. 31.

Pennsylvania: Baby as a weapon

A woman convicted of swinging her newborn son like a weapon at her boyfriend and fracturing the infant’s skull was sentenced in Erie on Wednesday to five to 10 years in prison. Chytoria Graham, 28, was fighting with boyfriend DeAngelo Troop after a night of drinking when she grabbed 4-week-old Jarron by his feet and swung him, hitting Troop. Graham allegedly told emergency workers that she had swung Jarron like a bat, but she testified at her trial that she remembered little of what happened that night.

California: Guilty in acid murder

A biochemist who killed her husband by knocking him out and pouring hydrochloric acid on him was convicted Wednesday of first-degree murder. A Superior Court jury found Larissa Schuster, 47, of Clovis guilty of murdering Timothy Schuster with the special circumstance that the murder was committed for financial gain. His half-dissolved body was found a few days after his 2003 death in a barrel that was inside a storage unit his wife had rented. Schuster was expected to be sentenced Jan. 16 to life in prison.

Algeria: Bomb deaths in dispute

Algerian officials Wednesday said the number of dead from a double bomb attack in Algiers rose to 31, but that figure was disputed by a newspaper, which cited hospital sources as estimating that 72 people were killed. Rescuers in the capital continued to search for survivors in heavily damaged offices of the United Nations, where 11 agency workers died in Tuesday’s blasts carried out by two suicide bombers belonging to the group al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb.

Britain: Alzheimer’s diagnosis

Best-selling fantasy author Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, he said on his illustrator’s Web site. In a note to fans entitled “An Embuggerance,” Pratchett, 59, said he was taking the news “fairly philosophically” and “possibly with a mild optimism.” “I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news,” he wrote.

Germany: Girls switched at birth

A clinic said Wednesday it has found the real parents of two infant girls who were mixed up and sent home with the wrong couples. The St. Elisabeth clinic in Saarlouis plans to have the two babies switched back to their parents within days. The girls probably were mixed up this summer, while they were being bathed, and remained with the wrong parents for about half a year, the clinic said. The mix-up came to light when one of the fathers took a paternity test.

@3. Headline Briefs 14 no:Vodka chugging nearly deadly

A man nearly died from alcohol poisoning after quaffing two pints of vodka at an airport security check instead of handing it over to comply with new rules about carrying liquids aboard a plane, police said Wednesday. The incident occurred Tuesday in Nuremberg, where the man, 64, was switching planes. New airport rules prohibit passengers from carrying larger quantities of liquids onto planes, and he was told at a security check he would have to either throw out the vodka or pay a fee to have his carry-on bag checked.

From Herald news services