Reported December 24, 2007

SAO PAULO, Brazil – Aloisio Lorscheider, one of Latin America’s most influential cardinals, died Sunday after a lengthy hospital stay. He was 83.

The Brazilian cardinal was hospitalized in early December with a heart condition, the Aparecida Archdiocese said in a statement.

The two-time president of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops played an influential role in the two conclaves of 1978 and pushed for the election of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Poland, who became Pope John Paul II.

Lorscheider created a stir in Brazil in 1998 when he doubted the healing effects of popular, tiny, rice-paper pills linked to Friar Galvao, who this year became Brazil’s first native-born saint.

Biologist who found cause of deadly virus
 

Terry L. Yates, 57, a biologist who discovered the source of the deadly hantavirus in the American Southwest and who held several leadership positions with the National Science Foundation in Washington, died Dec. 11 of brain cancer at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque.

In the spring of 1993, many people in the Four Corners region, where New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona meet, were stricken with a mysterious illness. The virus killed 32 people in a matter of weeks. Yates, with research partner Robert Parmenter, isolated the source of what came to be known as the hantavirus.

The virus was carried by deer mice, which were in abundance in 1993 because of unusually wet weather in the Southwest. Medical authorities have not been able to eliminate the hantavirus – which has killed more than 125 people in the United States in the past 15 years – but by learning how it is transmitted, they have greatly reduced its lethal effect.