Talk Bronx New York

The city shut two more school buildings in Queens on Wednesday and another charter school decided to cancel classes amid a sharp increase in flulike illnesses that brought the total to 30 closed schools across the four boroughs.

As the number of cases rose, worried parents flooded hospital waiting rooms with their children as officials tried to exercise caution in shutting more schools.

Since the swine flu virus first surfaced last month at St. Francis Preparatory School in Fresh Meadows, Queens, which had 69 confirmed cases, schools have been a major incubator of the virus. After a brief respite the strain, formally known as H1N1, re-emerged, leading 24 city schools to close in the last week. In addition, six more private and parochial schools in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan elected to shut down because of the rising numbers of ailing students.

By Wednesday afternoon, the city closed P.S. 242 in Flushing and P.S. 130 in Bayside, a building that also includes part of P.S 993, which offers special education. The New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries industries, which shares a building with a South Bronx elementary charter school also closed Wednesday. The charter school had closed on Tuesday.

Despite the 201 confirmed cases of the virus in New York City, most have been mild and there has been only one confirmed death from the virus, that of a 55-year-old educator. The funeral for Mitchell Wiener, an assistant principal at I.S. 238 in Hollis, Queens, who died of complications from swine flu on Sunday, was held this afternoon in Flushing. Read more..

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An episode of violence last month at the Rikers Island jail appears not to have been an isolated incident. Read more..

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When two guards were accused last month of encouraging inmates in one Rikers Island jail to police themselves, leading to beatings and in one case the killing of an inmate, correction officials called the situation “an aberration” and said they had not seen such a case in other units involving other guards.

But New York City has been sued in recent years by more than a half-dozen Rikers inmates claiming to have been the victims of beatings by prisoners while guards looked the other way, or worse, ordered the attacks. The city settled one case for $500,000, and another for just under $100,000. A new lawsuit was filed Tuesday.

And last year, Bronx prosecutors charged that a Rikers guard ordered six inmates to beat two prisoners; one victim was hospitalized with a collapsed lung. The guard has pleaded not guilty. Read more..

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After recent events at the youth facility at the Rikers Island jail, it is clear that New York City needs to do a much better job of training and supervising corrections officers there. Read more..

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Push in Bronx for H.I.V. Test for All

Dr. Donna Futterman, left, with Rosita Gonzalez and colleagues at Montefiore Medical Center, helped the city shape the plan.

The New York City health department plans to announce on Thursday an ambitious three-year effort to give an H.I.V. test to every adult living in the Bronx, which has a far higher death rate from AIDS than any other borough. The campaign will begin with a push to make the voluntary testing routine in emergency rooms and storefront clinics, where city officials say that cumbersome consent procedures required by state law have deterred doctors from offering the tests.

“Routine would mean if you came into the emergency room for asthma or a broken leg, we test everyone for H.I.V., if they’re willing,” the health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said in an interview on Wednesday.

While Manhattan has long been the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in New York, with the highest incidence of both AIDS and H.I.V., the virus that causes it, the Bronx, with its poorer population, has far more deaths from the disease. Public health officials attribute this to people not getting tested until it is too late to treat the virus effectively, thus turning a disease that can now be managed with medication into a death sentence.

Several AIDS experts said on Wednesday that the Bronx campaign was the most aggressive testing effort they could recall in the nation. Two years ago, Washington, D.C., made a high-profile push to test 450,000 residents, enlisting celebrity endorsements and distributing 80,000 free testing kits, but the campaign resulted in only about 45,000 people being tested.

“What’s new here is that we are implementing it on this large a level,” said Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the adolescent AIDS program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who helped New York develop the new program. “The Bronx has 1.3 million people. It’s bigger than most cities, bigger than Boston, bigger than Washington. We’re talking about a significant urban population.”

City officials estimate that 40 percent of the 830,000 people ages 18 to 64 in the Bronx have been tested for H.I.V. in the past year. Half of the remainder, about 250,000 people, have never been tested, and the goal is to test them first. Tests would be given at 40 designated sites, including clinics, community centers, churches and emergency rooms. Dr. Monica Sweeney, an assistant health commissioner for H.I.V. prevention, said the city had not set aside money specifically for the program, but would absorb the $12 cost of each test.

In organizing the campaign, which formally begins on Friday, Dr. Frieden has enlisted support from elected officials, health care providers and clergy members in the Bronx. But the proposal is raising some concerns.

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