IT'S NOT CHILD'S PLAY

Army rating system rigged against disabled veterans?

WASHINGTON - The Army might be shortchanging injured soldiers by rating the severity of their disabilities with a system that is both unwieldy and inconsistent, the head of a special commission said yesterday.

Pentagon officials denied those who rate disabilities would cheat service members but pledged to investigate. "I'm trying to make sense of this finding," said acting Army Secretary Pete Geren.

Meanwhile, two Democratic senators criticized the Department of Veterans Affairs, expressing concern that President Bush's nominee to be VA's undersecretary for health, Michael Kussman, was aware of problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center but didn't respond.

"The warning lights were flashing at Walter Reed years ago, but the Bush administration chose to ignore the problem and our injured service members paid the price," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

* Divorce in the military was

no higher after four years of war than it was in peacetime a decade earlier, despite the stress of long and repeated tours of duty, a Rand Corp. has study found.

Video shows ex-lawmaker

pocketing the Benjamins

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Jurors in a former legislator's bribery and extortion trial saw video yesterday of the politician pocketing a pile of hundred-dollar bills counted out by an undercover FBI agent.

Video clips of an August 2004 meeting show the agent counting out what was described as $10,000 before former state Sen. John Ford scoops the money off a desk and sticks it in his pockets.

"I ain't gonna try to count," Ford said. "I hope I trust you."

Ford contends he was a business consultant drawing what he thought were honest payments from an electronics recycling company. Ford also contends he was targeted by federal agents running a statewide corruption investigation code-named Tennessee Waltz, though agents disputed that in testimony yesterday.

Pain pill's side effect

could be heart attack

GAITHERSBURG, Md. - A panel of federal drug advisers voted 20-1 yesterday to reject an application by Merck to sell its pain pill Arcoxia, because of concerns the drug could cause as many as 30,000 heart attacks annually if widely used.

"What you're talking about is a potential public-health disaster" if Arcoxia is approved for sale, Dr. David Graham, an FDA safety officer, told the panel.

Arcoxia is a sister to Vioxx, which Merck withdrew in 2004 after a study showed that it also increased the risks of heart attacks and strokes. Merck sells Arcoxia in 63 countries, and the company underwrote an extensive safety-testing program that involved 34,000 arthritis patients.

The studies showed that Arcoxia causes nearly three times as many heart attacks, strokes and deaths as naproxen, a popular pain pill sold as Aleve, but was no more effective in curing pain. Patients taking Arcoxia suffered worrisome increases in blood pressure.

New medicine needed

for tougher gonorrhea

The rates of drug-resistant gonorrhea in the United States have increased so greatly in the last five years that doctors should now treat the infection with a different class of antibiotics, the last line of defense for the sexually transmitted disease, officials said yesterday.

The percentage of drug-resistant gonorrhea cases among heterosexual men jumped, to 6.7 percent in 2006 compared with 0.6 percent in 2001, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Standard monitoring of gonorrhea cases is conducted among men who go to STD clinics. New data from such sites in 26 cities show that rates of drug-resistant gonorrhea among heterosexual men last year reached 26 percent in Philadelphia and more than 20 percent in Honolulu and four sites in California.

Among gay men, the rates of the bacterial infection jumped, to 38 percent in the first half of 2006 from 1.6 percent in 2001.

Guards at federal jail

charged in two beatings

NEW YORK - Jail guards at a federal lockup have been charged with viciously beating two inmates, and in one case trying to conceal the attack by making it look like a suicide attempt.

An indictment charges 11 former and current corrections officers at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn with violating the civil rights of the two inmates in separate assaults in 2002 and 2006.

Capt. Salvatore Lopresti, a high-ranking supervisor, pleaded not guilty yesterday, and was released on $250,000 bond. Defense attorney Zach Margulis-Ohnuma described Lopresti as a family man "with deep roots in the community."

Subtracting like rabbits

EPHRATA, Wash. - Only four of a group of 20 endangered rabbits reintroduced to the wild with great fanfare last month have survived attacks by predators, state officials said. *

- Daily News wire services