By Liz Robbins

May 21, 2009 – 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.

I.S. 238 is the only school in the city where students — four of them — have confirmed cases of the new strain of virus. The criteria for closing a school because of concerns about swine flu has become a point of contention with educators and parents, and one that the city has yet to spell out.

“I know people would like there to be a perfect formula where you can push a button and decide,” Dt. Thomas R. Frieden, the departing city health commissioner, said at an afternoon news conference. “It has to do with how many kids are sick, for how long they’ve been sick, what proportion of the school that represents, how that’s changed from day to day. We’ve seen different patterns.”

The United Federation of Teachers has been monitoring absentism in the schools because of the flulike symptoms and said it planned to hold a news conference on Thursday to discuss its findings.

The effect of the increased school closings has become evident in the crowded hospital waiting rooms over the past few days, said Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “While there are abnormal number of people going to the hospital, who are worried, virtually none, a very tiny percentage of them have any symptoms whatsoever,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Alan Aviles, the chief executive of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, said that across the system, there has been a 20 percent increase in emergency room visits by adults and a 50 percent rise among children. The greatest volume of patients was at Elmhurst Hospital Center and Queens Hospital Center, Mr. Aviles said.

On Tuesday, a tent was erected outside of Queens Hospital to act as a field triage unit, “simply because there were so many parents,” Mr. Aviles said, though its was taken down on Wednesday.

The National Pediatric Center in Corona was packed a line of with parents and young children that spilled onto the sidewalk on Wednesday afternoon, and a half-dozen strollers were parked at the door.

Sandra Neira, 26, who wanted her son Manuel, 5, examined because of a cough and slight cold, said she was told she had a wait of a couple of hours.

Ms. Neira said her son’s school, P.S. 143, told her to have him examined and to return with a doctor’s note.

“It’s just a little cough,” she said. “But it’s better to be careful.”

Dario Centorcelli, a spokesman for Elmhurst Hospital Center, said the hospital was able to handle the volume.

“The range is probably from people coming in for precautions or people with low grade fevers, kids that may be sick for one reason or another,” Mr. Centorcelli said.

One child who was treated at Elmhurst Hospital did die, Mr. Centorcelli said, but preliminary tests returned Tuesday night from New York City’s Department of Health showed that the 16-month old infant, Jonathan Zamora Castillo, of Corona, Queens, did not have the H1N1 virus. As a precaution, tissue specimens were sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to rule out the strain as a definitive cause.

As the virus continued to spread in schools, the mayor and health commissioner on Wednesday addressed concerns about the spread of the flu at Rikers Island, where there were four inmates with confirmed cases of the swine flu, and four more probable cases. Last weekend, some inmates had reported flulike symptoms. pending.

Although the mayor said that there was no indication the virus had spread at Rikers, the union for the corrections officers was wary. The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association had asked for the city to shut down the affected area of Rikers or at least move some inmates to other locations to isolate the sick and prevent transmission. In addition, it had wanted a complete sanitation of the facility.

But when the Department of Corrections did not acquiesce, the union threatened a lawsuit and on Tuesday filed a letter of complaint with the city Department of Labor accusing the Department of Correction of maintaining an unsafe working environment at Rikers.

“Our objective is to reduce the number of transmissions and to protect the correction officers,” said Richard Koehler, the chief counsel for the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, who said he intends to file the suit on Friday.

“We want a task force set up,” Mr. Koehler added. “We want independent medical people to do screening on the island; we don’t want to be sitting around without a plan.”

A spokesman for the Department of Corrections said it did have a plan in place, which includes screening every new inmate for symptoms, checking prisoners who seek medical attention for swine flu, and limiting the circulation of inmates in areas where any had been infected.

“I’m not going to comment on the complaint that they filed,” the spokesman, Stephen J. Morello, said. “I would say that we continue to take aggressive steps against the flu and we assess those steps on a day to day basis. This is all part of the plan we developed and implemented in close cooperation with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

By David Brown and Robin Shulman

May 20, 2009 – A survey of people hospitalized because of swine flu in California has raised the possibility that obesity is as much of a risk factor for serious complications from the flu as diabetes, heart disease and pregnancy, all known to raise a person’s risk.

In all, about two-thirds of the California patients had some underlying medical condition, according to a report yesterday in the weekly bulletin of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Nationwide, 47 states and the District have reported 5,469 cases and six deaths since the start of the outbreak in late April, according to the CDC’s count. Yesterday, officials in Missouri reported a seventh U.S. death — that of a 44-year-old man who had no underlying medical problems, wire services reported.

“We were surprised by the frequency of obesity among the severe cases that we’ve been tracking,” said Anne Schuchat, one of the CDC epidemiologists managing the outbreak. She said scientists are “looking into” the possibility that obese people should be at the head of the line along with other high-risk groups if a swine flu vaccine becomes available.

Other studies have shown that pregnant women are also at higher risk for serious influenza infection, especially in the third trimester, when the fetus and womb compress the lower parts of the lungs. This makes it harder to breathe deeply and cough forcefully; it may also alter blood flow in the chest. A similar thing may be occurring in severely overweight people, some experts speculated.

The average age of the 30 Californians hospitalized for swine flu was 27.5 years. Nearly three-quarters were women, and 65 percent were Hispanic. Half lived in two counties bordering Mexico.

Of the 30 people, 11 had a lung ailment such as asthma or emphysema, six had an immune disorder, five had heart disease, five were pregnant, four had diabetes and four were obese.

In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg (I) said officials were investigating whether 16-month-old Jonathan Castillo, who died with a high fever Monday night at a Queens hospital, had contracted the H1N1 virus. The toddler’s 3-year-old sibling was treated for flulike symptoms and released.

The mayor said lack of health insurance or immigration status should not deter people who feel sick from seeking attention.

“Whether you have health insurance coverage or your immigration status is in question, it doesn’t matter,” Bloomberg said. “We will not ask about that.”

The mayor also said four inmates at a Rikers Island jail had been confirmed to have the H1N1 virus and four more are likely to have it.

The union representing the city’s correctional officers criticized the response to the swine flu outbreak among inmates and filed a letter of protest with the state Labor Department.

“If I had to design a place where you could put people who were sick and get as many people sick as possible, it’s the New York City jail,” said Richard J. Koehler, a lawyer for the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association.

By: Josh Barbanel

May 8, 2009 — Jerry Francesco and his wife, Lucille, have experienced the ups and downs of ordinary human life in the rarefied spaces designed by celebrity architects during the late lamented condominium construction boom in Manhattan.

Late last month, Mr. Francesco, who built and sold a business providing support services to dialysis patients, and his wife paid $7.9 million for a sprawling penthouse at the 22-story Brompton, a new red brick and limestone condominium designed by Robert A. M. Stern at East 85th Street and Third Avenue.

The apartment has five bedrooms, a maid’s room and 3,300 square feet of space in a building with an arched entrance way and a lobby with a marble floor and two landscaped interior courtyards. And to the delight of the Francescos and their lawyer, the condo comes without a private cobblestone sidewalk and driveway.

In 2005, when the real estate boom was young, the couple, who have a home in southeastern Pennsylvania, bought a condo at One Beacon Court, a new building on 58th Street and Third Avenue designed by Cesar Pelli.

The central feature of Mr. Pelli’s design was an elliptical wall of glass that wraps around an intimate cobblestone courtyard beneath a soaring 58-story skyscraper. Condos in the building sold fast, with the sponsor sometimes increasing the prices overnight. The Francescos paid $2.9 million for a two-bedroom apartment on the 42nd floor.

But less than a year later, Ms. Francesco was walking in the courtyard when she tripped over a wheelchair ramp leading from the sidewalk to a driveway. The sidewalk and the roadway were both paved with the same granite stone, and were the same color, except for a thin accent line of darker stone along the curb.

Ms. Francesco, who is in her 60s, fractured her wrist and required surgery to install a plate and screws to help the fracture heal.

The day after she fell, Mr. Francesco said, the building managers put warning signs on both sides of the curb cuts; they eventually installed large planters to prevent others from falling.

In a case that has been wending its way through federal and state court, Ms. Francesco’s lawyer, Mathew Paulose Jr. of Isaacs, Devasia, Castro & Wien LLP, has been assembling evidence in an effort to show that the developer, Steven Roth, the chairman of Vornado Realty Trust, personally selected the paving stones and intentionally put the architect’s vision and aesthetics ahead of safety. The Francescos are seeking up to $1 million in damages.

“These individuals who were trying to be masters of the universe in New York City, they don’t care about the little people,” Mr. Paulose said.

A Vornado spokesman said this version of events was “totally incorrect,” and in court papers the building blames Ms. Francesco’s own negligence for her fall.

But in a deposition, Mr. Francesco said that after his wife fell, a doorman told him he had seen people trip and stumble over the sidewalk ramp “at least once a day.” Mr. Francesco said that when he asked the building manager, Sean O’Sullivan, why nothing had been done about the ramp, he was told that “they did not want to spoil the architectural appearance of the building.”

Mr. O’Sullivan did not return a phone message left at his office.

The court record includes several memos from an engineering firm that were sent to Vornado and the Pelli firm, warning that at least several designs for the courtyard paving created a “trip hazard” and “potential liability issues relating to pedestrian safety” as long as “the sidewalk and street are the same color and material.

The case had an unusual twist that might be of interest to condominiums. After many hours of depositions and several years in federal court, the case was thrown out by Judge Lawrence M. McKenna in January. It had been brought in federal court because the primary residence of the Francescos is in Pennsylvania. But the judge found that the “citizenship” of the condominium association was in question, since the members lived in many places, including Pennsylvania.

The case was refiled in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

The Francescos sold their Beacon Court apartment last summer, before the falloff in prices, benefiting perhaps from the architectural stature of the building. They received $5.95 million for it, nearly doubling their investment.

Mr. Palouse said the couple sold because they wanted an apartment on a quieter street outside of the central business district.

Class Action Suit Says TLC’s Plan to Place GPS Tracking Software on all Taxi Meters is an Invasion of Privacy and a Violation of Taxi Drivers’ Constitutional Right to their Property

New York, September 19, 2007— The New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), which represents over 10,000 taxi drivers, held a press conference today at the office of their General Counsel, Isaacs, Devasia, Castro & Wien LLP, to announce their filing of a federal class action lawsuit against the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), which seeks both a temporary restraining order and a preliminary injunction to block the TLC from installing a technology software program that includes GPS tracking on all New York City taxi meters. The lawsuit was filed in United States Southern District Court on behalf of NYTWA and all drivers, particularly those drivers who own their own medallions and who are most at risk to incur penalties if they refuse to comply with the TLC’s mandate. Drivers are facing a suspension of their medallions and additional fines if they refuse to sign contracts with the TLC’s chosen GPS vendors.

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