30 Years and Counting

Howard County General Hospital marks its 30th anniversary with a health fair on Saturday, May 10, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Gov. Robert Ehrlich, wife Kendall and son Drew will cut a 7-foot-tall birthday cake. In recognition of Safe Kids Week (May 3-10), child safety seats will be inspected; children, fingerprinted. On hand will be magicians, puppets, clowns, a zoomobile and 20 service organizations.

Advising Disney When Disney film makers, at work in the Baltimore region on Ladder 49, a movie about a firefighter starring John Travolta and Joaquin Phoenix, needed advice on the treatment of burn patients, they turned to the experts. Cleon Goodwin, chief of the Baltimore Regional Burn Center at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, and nurse Barbara Ward, patient care manager, reviewed the script and helped draft an accurate portrayal of burn patients and their care. Moviemakers toured the facility; nursing director Myra Jo Beach supplied them with authentic gowns and masks.

Getting There Want to go from East Baltimore to Bayview? Worried you can't get there from here? An updated transportation guide called The Navigator, complete with detailed schedules and routes for all shuttles making the rounds of East Baltimore and points beyond, will show you the way. The Navigator is available online at www.hopkinsmedicine.org/security/transportation/shuttles. For more information, call the transportation department: 410-502-6880.

Book Notes Three cookbooks will help you use your diet more aggressively to manage, or perhaps stave off, respectively, cardiovascular disease, obesity and arthritis. Published as part of the new Johns Hopkins Cookbook Library, the 160-page-books, each with 140 easy-to-follow recipes, emphasize healthy eating, along with foods that are easy to find. "Off-the-shelf" recipes maximize packaged foods without compromising nutrition. Those canned creamed soups Mom used in her chicken casseroles are back, now in their reduced-sodium/reduced-fat iterations. Even those without arthritis will appreciate the arthritis cookbook. Recipes can be prepared with a minimum of chopping, either in a short time or over a long period of unattended cooking, using all those heaven-sent, pre-chopped foods now in produce sections of supermarkets everywhere. Revised and updated, the recently released Symptoms & Remedies is an easy-to-use reference that can help you pinpoint the cause of hundreds of symptoms and then, through a second portion of the book containing detailed descriptions of 323 medical conditions, figure out what to do about them. Recipes for Weight Loss, Recipes for a Healthy Heart and Recipes for Arthritis Health are published by Rebus Inc. in collaboration with nutritionist Lora Brown Wilder and physicians John Flynn (Arthritis), Lawrence Cheskin (Weight Loss) and Simeon Margolis (Healthy Heart and medical consultant on all Hopkins/Rebus publications). Cost: $19.95 per title, plus S&H. Symptoms & Remedies: $28.95, plus $2.95 S&H. Order: www.hopkinsafter50.com