Across the Nation

Justice Dept. starts e-mail investigation

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department has initiated a criminal investigation into whether the White House failed to turn over e-mails to a campaign-finance probe and then made threats to keep them secret, court documents disclosed yesterday.

Among the e-mails that may not have been produced are those to Vice President Al Gore, whose e-mail account was not connected to the White House computer archiving system, according to a statement by White House counsel Beth Nolan.

The investigation comes on the heels of the recent White House admission that computer-programming errors prevented it from searching thousands of incoming e-mails from 1996 to 1999 in response to subpoenas issued by the Justice Department's task force on campaign finance and the Republican-led House Government Reform Committee.

The new probe is limited to e-mails subpoenaed by the campaign finance task force, but it runs parallel to Republican charges that the White House has hidden e-mails about campaign finance, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the deadly siege of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, and other matters of controversy.

The issue quickly turned political, as Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush in Florida last Wednesday took a shot at Gore, and said, "The best campaign finance reform starts with having an administration that will adhere to the law and an attorney general who will enforce the law."

White House spokesman Jim Kennedy said, "We have been in touch in recent weeks with the campaign-finance task force and we are continuing to work with them to provide the information they need."

The criminal investigation came to light in court documents filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia by the White House counsel seeking a delay in a civil case filed in part by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch.

The filing seeks a halt in an investigation of the same e-mail questions by the Justice Department's Civil Division in response to the Judicial Watch suit because it would interfere with the criminal investigation.

In an attached statement, Robert Conrad Jr., chief of the Justice campaign-finance task force, said he launched the investigation after learning about the missing e-mails and allegations of White House threats to keep contractors quiet about the e-mails.

Conrad's statement added that Whitewater independent counsel Robert Ray concurs that the civil case could interfere with the task force probe. Ray last week said he also was looking into the issue of the missing e-mails.

Meanwhile, in a hearing yesterday on the e-mails held by Rep. Dan Burton, (R-Ind.), chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, Northrop Grumman contractors said they notified White House officials in 1998 about the computer errors that had begun two years earlier.

The five contractors who testified said they remember being told to keep quiet about what was a sensitive issue. Three of the contractors recalled being told they could be jailed if word about the e-mails got out, but two other contractors said they did not recall being threatened with jail.

California Latinos report poorer health

WASHINGTON - Latino adults in California are more likely to say they are in poor health than Latinos in most other states, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported yesterday.

The CDC study, part of a growing effort to understand health disparities between minorities and whites, is the first ever to provide state-by-state comparisons.

Racial and ethnic disparities in health emerged as a major public health issue in the 1990s, as research showed that blacks, Latinos and some Asians were faring worse than whites by many health measures.

The Atlanta-based CDC provided no explanation for the disparities in its report, but previous research has pointed to differences in income, education, diet and culture - not to race or color.

The CDC study showed that whites also report significant differences in health. For example, 22 percent of whites in Kentucky rated their health as fair to poor while only 3 percent of whites in the District of Columbia did.

"This is a tool for states to use to see how they compare nationally," said epidemiologist Julie Bolen, the study's lead author.

"On some indicators, such as colorectal cancer screening, every group is doing poorly. Fortunately, most of the issues we talk about in this report relate to behaviors that can be changed."

The 60-page study tracked 16 health-related measures covering access to care, health status, risk behaviors and preventive screenings. Included were such factors a lack of health insurance, obesity, cigarette smoking and regular mammograms. The information was compiled from surveys taken by state health departments.

Bolen said that the study should be viewed as an initial effort and that much work remains to be done. For example, the results did not adjust for differences in age among populations in the various states and that is a key variable in assessing health risks.

As a whole, Californians were more likely to be uninsured. 19 percent of all Californians lacked coverage, compared to a median of 12 percent for the nation. Among Latinos, the gap in coverage was even wider. In California, 39 percent of Latino adults were uninsured compared to a median of 23 percent nationally.

Bill Wright, head of cancer surveillance for the state health department, said that the high proportion of uninsured might help explain why more Latinos in California report being in poor health. "We're not doing too well on that particular health care indicator," he said.

Twenty-six percent of Latino adults in California said that they were in fair to poor health, compared to a median of 16 percent among Latinos nationally. In Texas about the same proportion of Latinos as in California reported fair to poor health .

Fingernail bacteria linked to 16 deaths

OKLAHOMA CITY - Bacteria found under the long fingernails of two nurses may have contributed to the deaths of 16 sickly babies in 1997 and 1998 in an Oklahoma City hospital, researchers say.

All of the babies were newborns in the neo-natal intensive care unit at Children's Hospital of Oklahoma, and all had infections caused by the same bacteria found under the nurses' nails.

But researchers said they cannot be certain that the nurses transmitted the bacteria to the infants. And the hospital pointed out that the babies had seriously deficient immune systems, and said that other problems played a larger role in their deaths.

Nevertheless, the hospital has changed its policy to require short fingernails on nurses, and no babies in the neo-natal ICU have died from the bacterial infection since then.

The findings were reported in the February issue of the Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology Journal. The study was done by the state Health Department, the hospital and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"We felt like the connection was strong enough to report it," said state epidemiologist Dr. Michael Crutcher, who helped write the study. But he added: "There was no way to definitively prove that this was the mechanism of transmission."

Dr. William Jarvis, chief of the investigation and prevention branch of the CDC's hospital infection program, said the agency has investigated two or three outbreaks over the past 10 years in which fingernails were thought to have played a role.

But like the Oklahoma hospital, Jarvis suggested that other factors were at play. "In all of these with data to support that fingernails have been the critical element, it hasn't been the only element," he said.

The bacteria, pseudomonas aeruginosa, can be found in every hospital nursery in America, said Dr. Roger Sheldon, medical director of the hospital.

The death rate in the hospital's neo-natal ICU is close to the national rate, but at one point, the staff noticed an increase of approximately one death per month. The hospital called the CDC, which studied the records of all the babies who had been in the unit in 1997 and the first three months of 1998.

Of 439 newborns admitted during that period, 46 acquired the bacterial infection and 16 died.

The study found evidence of an association between the bacteria and exposure to two nurses with long or artificial fingernails. The bacteria were also found on two sinks and fingernails of another nurse with short, natural nails, but that nurse was not linked to the infection in the infants.

The CDC suggested improved hand-washing and requiring nurses to have short, natural fingernails, which are considered less likely to harbor germs.

Yvonne Sibley, head nurse in the neo-natal ICU, said all nurses in the hospital must now have nails that are considered piano-playing length.

Crutcher, the state epidemiologist, said at no time was there negligence on the part of hospital personnel.

The newborns in the neo-natal ICU are mostly premature and may weigh as little as a pound, or were born to mothers with drug habits, said Gay Conner, a hospital spokeswoman.

"Just because of the nature that they're in NICU, already their immune systems are compromised," Conner said yesterday. "Fifty percent of the ones who died would have died from something else."

Added Sheldon, the hospital's medical director: "These children didn't die of infection. They died of being born way too soon."