This year, for instance, LL walked into Phil Mendelson's office on May 15 to see the at-large councilmember hunched over a typewriter shortly before the deadline. Mendelson, as it happens, is one of the few folks in town who reports anything of substance on his forms.

Most declare nothing, and some haven't filed at all. Last week, OCF published a lengthy list of nearly 1,000 nonfilers. Many of those are low-level functionaries, many of them no longer work for the District, but a handful were top-level officials.

LL followed up with OCF and had learned that several of them have complied since the list was compiled. But Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, human services director Clarence Carter, and health director Pierre Vigilance, and elected State Board of Education member William Lockridge still have not submitted forms.

Among the late filers who have since turned in forms: Office of Property Management Director Robin-Eve Jasper, Public Service Commission chair Betty Ann Kane, TV-and-film czar Kathy Hollinger, Department of Insurance, Securities, and Banking chief Thomas Hampton, and SBOE member Dotti Love Wade.

Wesley Williams, an OCF spokesperson, says letters have been sent to all the folks who failed to file by May 15. The nonfilers have until tomorrow to file before the cases are referred for hearings.

UPDATE, 6/19, 10:45 A.M.: Williams tells LL that Thomas Hampton's name was on the late-filer list due to an error on OCF's part—not Hampton's.

UPDATE, 6/19, 11:35 A.M.: Same goes for Kane, Wade, and Hollinger, Williams says. And Rhee filed hers late yesterday afternoon.

Those comparisons came from Dr. Shannon Hader, head of the city's HIV/AIDS Administration and a former public health officer who did extensive work in Africa. But LL and LL's boss had the thought: Is this just another example of the District suffering in an apples-to-oranges comparison—you know, where the District is compared to a state or country encompassing both urban, rural, and suburban areas rather than to its peer cities?

So after today's press conference on the numbers, LL asked Hader to put the numbers in context of American cities: "Our rates are twice as high as New York City and five times as high as Detroit," she said, adding she wasn't aware of a city with a higher infection rate.

Hader added this thought: "What I'm most concerned with is...southern cities are starting to have the same complexity of epidemic that we have, where you have every risk factor contributing. I hope that in a sense we can be a cautionary tale to some of our other southern urban centers who if they don't take the opportunity to know they're data and intervene now, they could evolve to matching us, and we don't want anyone to evolve further."

Hader and her boss, health director Dr. Pierre Vigilance, both made the point that D.C. in recent years has developed one of the most comprehensive testing regimes in the country. Vigilance, in his slight British accent, pointed to a "surveillance bias," where "doing a better job of testing people means more people actually get tested and more people get results. And you may find that there are more people with disease than you knew beforehand."

The unspoken subtext, of course, is that if New York or Detroit or Uganda or Kenya tested as thoroughly and reported their data as thoroughly as the District does, the District might not look so bad.

In any case, the four folks behind the mic at this morning's presser—Hader, Vigilance, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, and Councilmember David A. Catania—urged District residents to get tested regularly for HIV.

So LL asked each of them when their last test was. Said Hader, "I've been tested as recently as I access heath care, so i guess I'm a few months behind in my annual checkup." Vigilance said, "I was tested last year and need to get tested again this year." Fenty said he'd been tested "within the last year," and Catania said, "It has been some time," citing his now seven-year-long committed relationship as reason for his delinquency. (For the record, LL was tested when he had a checkup in fall 2007.)

Sandy Ethridge, 59, was pronounced dead at Prince George's Hospital Center on the morning of Dec. 15. He had been admitted on Dec. 11 to the Addiction Prevention and Recovery Administration's detox facility on the D.C. General campus, according to sister Annie Holder.

Ethridge, a resident of Potomac Gardens in Capitol Hill, had been sent to detox under a court order, Holder says; he had been admitted to the facility several times before for treatment of drug and alcohol addictions. On Monday morning, according to an account related to Holder by a detective investigating the death, Ethridge was seen by a fellow patient using a needle and syringe to inject drugs in a facility bathroom. When patients were awakened for breakfast a few hours later, according to the account, he was discovered to be unconscious and unresponsive and was taken to the Maryland hospital.

"I said, 'Well, where did he get [the drugs] from?" Holder says.

An investigation into the cause of death is pending, according to the Maryland medical examiner's office. A call to the investigating detective today was not immediately returned.

If Ethridge was indeed determined to have died from a drug overdose, it raises serious questions about security at the APRA facility, which is charged with providing indigent District residents with inpatient addiction treatment. Facility policies require strictly controlled access to the facility and thorough searches of patients upon admittance.

Dr. Pierre Vigilance, head of the District's health department, declined to comment on the specifics of Ethridge's death. "The passing of any client is unfortunate. We take this situation very seriously, and we are in the process of carefully reviewing this matter. Out of respect for our client's privacy we are unable to provide details of his demise at this time."