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National Institutes Of Health

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Santa Claus is Coming to Town—on a Motorcycle

With help from Montgomery County police, Santa will ride from Germantown to the Children’s Inn in Bethesda to deliver gifts to sick kids.

As part of a charitable effort by Montgomery County police, a motorcycle-riding St. Nick—flanked by 20 of Montgomery County’s finest—will carry donated gifts to Children’s Inn in Bethesda on Wednesday. Santa’s “sleigh” ride begins in Germantown at 10 a.m. at the District 5 station in Germantown then makes two stops — Gaithersburg-Germantown Chamber of Commerce on Clopper Road and Sheehy Ford on Frederick Road. Santa plans to lunch at Vince & Dominics Pizzeria in Bethesda. The motorcade is expected to reach Children’s Inn by 5:30 p.m., just in time for a party. Part of the National Institutes of Health, Children’s Inn is a nonprofit facility that offers lodging for children receiving treatment at NIH and their families. Police are still …

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Montgomery, NIH Near ‘Superbug’ Agreement

Pact would require notification of the public.

  After a fatal “superbug” swept through the National Institutes of Health earlier this year unbeknownst to the public, state and county officials are on the verge of an agreement that will require NIH to report outbreaks of similar hospital-acquired infections, according to Montgomery County's health officer. Last fall, a drug-resistant strain of Klebsiella pneumoniae spread throughout NIH’s research hospital, infecting 18 people. Twelve of those cases were fatal; seven attributed to Klebsiella. Federal and state guidelines did not require NIH to report the outbreak, and NIH officials said they chose not to alert the public earlier because healthy people outside the hospital were at little to no risk, The Washington Post reported. …

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