Etc.

If a teacher had written that essay describing working conditions in a typical public school in this country, he or she would have been fired and had his or her license yanked.
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The mystery continues over the pair of 73-year-old identical twins found dead at Lake Tahoe. Authorities are trying to find next of kin since neither woman married or had children.

It is believed the two died within hours of each other.

Joan Miller was a senior accounting clerk in the payroll department at the Lake Tahoe Unified School District from 1979 to 1984. Patricia Miller, who drove a white convertible with red upholstery, worked in the El Dorado County's social services office during that same time.

"I never heard of anyone else being in either of their lives," said Betty Mitchell, 89, who supervised Patricia Miller in the social services office and saw the twins around town. "They were inseparable and really identical."

The sisters were friendly and often told stories of their singing adventures. They told Mitchell they had performed at Yosemite National Park and when their mother came to visit from Oregon, they all dined at Mitchell's home.

It makes me wonder if they came into a sizable inheritance to be living like they did for decades without any visible means of support.
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This is an interesting piece about those high school girls in Le Roy, New York, who have suffered from a baffling ailment causing uncontrollable twitching.

Le Roy certainly had vulnerable patients and a supportive environment. And in late January, Rosario Trifiletti, a pediatric neurologist from Ramsey, N.J., stepped forward with a theory of the illness. In a local doctor’s office, where a group of concerned parents had gathered to hear what he had to say, Trifiletti laid out his thinking: the girls were suffering from an illness similar to Pandas (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus), a disease in which the immune system alters the neurochemistry of young people suffering from strep infection. The parents had questions, and Trifiletti seemed to have reasonable answers. If it was an infection, why would it only affect girls? Trifiletti explained that it might be their more sensitive endocrine systems. Why so many girls, if Pandas is generally rare? It could be a particularly virulent infection. What about the environmental toxins? That might be compromising their immune systems in ways that left them particularly vulnerable to this kind of autoimmune disease.

Susan Swedo, the neurologist at the National Institutes of Health who first described the disease, has implied that she doubted Pandas or a similar syndrome could be responsible for the symptoms in Le Roy. The phenomenon is rare enough that the odds of so many students suffering from it at once, all in one high school, were almost impossible. But a week later, after examining the girls, Trifiletti revealed on “Dr. Drew” that all nine of the girls he tested showed evidence of either strep exposure or exposure to the organism associated with pneumonia. Results were far from conclusive, and he would need to study the levels of antibodies in their blood over time to know more, but he said there was enough evidence to get them started on antibiotics and anti-inflammatories.