Texas

Dallas airport terminals evacuated after alarms

Three terminals at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport were evacuated Thursday after alarms sounded to indicate a bag may have contained explosive material, officials said.

“The machine found something,” Transportation Security Administration spokesman Ed Martelle said Thursday night. “The problem is we don’t know what and we don’t know how much.”

Neither the bag nor the man who carried it have been found.

Federal regulations that went into effect Jan. 1 require that all checked bags be checked for explosives by an X-ray machine or a screener.

The breech delayed at least 80 American Airlines and 20 American Eagle flights, airline officials said.

Washington, D.C.

Post office initiates rate increase process

The post office is beginning the process of seeking a rate increase even as it awaits congressional action that would make the step unnecessary.

The internal process of preparing for a new rate case has started, postal vice president Azeezaly Jaffer confirmed Thursday. The amount of any increase won’t be determined until that analysis is completed.

Last fall, a financial review discovered that the Postal Service had paid too much into a retirement program for workers who joined the agency before 1983.

Correcting that error could permit the post office to cut its payments into the system by $2.9 billion in 2003 and $2.6 billion in 2004. Postmaster General John E. Potter said that money could allow the next rate increase to be delayed until 2006.

One hitch is that reducing the payments requires action by Congress and that has yet to happen.

St. Louis

Survey: More women quit hormone therapy

More than a third of women on hormone replacement therapy quit taking it after two studies last year questioned the drugs’ safety, a national survey released Thursday said.

The studies, in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., raised doubts about the safety of a combined hormone replacement therapy of estrogen and progestin.

Thursday’s report was based on 372,777 users of hormone therapy. The women surveyed had insurance drug benefits through Express Scripts, a St. Louis-based pharmacy benefit manager that tracks prescription drug trends.

According to the survey, 36 percent of women quit the drugs in the first four months after the journal publication in July. Fifty-seven percent continued to take them, the survey found. The remaining women switched to other products.

The quit rate was four times the rate for the same period a year earlier, before the studies came out.

Seattle

Researchers link gene to irregular heartbeat

A gene mutation linked to atrial fibrillation, a type of heartbeat irregularity, has been identified by researchers who studied four generations of Chinese family with a history of the disorder.

In a study appearing this week in the journal Science, Chinese and French researchers report that a mutation on a gene called KCNQ1 is the apparent cause of an inherited form of atrial fibrillation.

Atrial fibrillation affects more than 5 percent of people over the age of 65. The disorder lowers the pumping efficiency of the heart. It can cause blood clots, other types of heartbeat irregularities and heart failure.

To find the gene, researchers performed genetic screening on 44 members of a Chinese family with a history of atrial fibrillation. Sixteen of the family members were diagnosed with the disorder.