A resident of a Thousand Oaks nursing home has been arrested on suspicion of killing his roommate, the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office said.

Deputies responded at 4:40 a.m. Friday to a call from the Silverado memory care facility on Warwick Avenue about a resident who was agitated and had broken a window, according to a Sheriff’s Department news release.

The deputies found the resident Thomas Buckley, 58, in a common area of the facility and detained him, authorities said. The nursing home’s staff then checked on his roommate, Michael Patterson, 72. The workers found that Patterson had severe injuries, which appeared to be caused by an assault.

Paramedics were called to the scene and Patterson was pronounced dead a short time later, authorities said.

Investigators said that before deputies arrived, Buckley had assaulted one of the facility’s workers, causing minor injuries.

Patterson’s death is being investigated as a homicide. The Ventura County Medical Examiner’s Office will conduct an autopsy to determine the official cause and manner of death.

Buckley was booked on suspicion of murder, assault with a deadly weapon and vandalism, the Sheriff’s Department said. He remains in custody and his bail was set at $2 million. His arraignment hearing is scheduled for Tuesday at 1:30 p.m. in Ventura County Superior Court.

Anyone with information regarding this incident should contact Det. Gerardo Cruz at (805) 384-4726 or Det. Erik Hernandez at (805) 384-4729.

Los Angeles County health officials said they have detected H5N1 bird flu virus in wastewater collected from the A.K. Warren Water Resource Facility in Carson.

The viral “hit” was detected on Oct. 28 by WastewaterSCAN, an infectious disease monitoring network run by researchers at Stanford, Emory University and Verily, Alphabet Inc.’s life sciences organization.

Hits were also seen during the last week in San José, Redwood City, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, Marina and Turlock.

The Carson plant processes wastewater from roughly 50% of L.A. County’s population, said Annabelle de St. Maurice, the L.A. County Department of Public Health’s director of community outbreak and syndromic surveillance.

Officials say they have not identified the source of the virus, but suggested a few possibilities, including discarded contaminated animal products and infected wild bird droppings. They are also “actively engaging key risk groups,” including dairy and meat-processing sites nearby.

“The likely sources more likely appear to be from animal products, rather than wild birds,” De St. Maurice said.

She said the risk to the public remains low.

H5N1 bird flu has been detected in 203 California dairy herds since August; 17 dairy workers have also been infected. Across the nation, 41 people have been infected — 21 from dairy cows, 19 from poultry and one unknown. The USDA has reported 404 positive dairy herds in 14 states. This number does not include eight herds detected earlier this week in Utah.

It’s also been conclusively detected in a pig from Oregon.

De St. Maurice said the county routinely monitors and tests symptomatic birds, pets and wild mammals.

In addition, she said, the county is working within the community to subtype flu specimens collected in health clinics and hospitals specimens “to see if there are potential H5N1 human cases.”

She noted the county’s public health department is also doing “outreach and education to communities that are at risk,” but said that, so far, there have been no human cases.

De St. Maurice said it was this kind of work — subtyping flu specimens — that enabled Missouri health officials to identify an H5N1 human case that had no reported dairy or poultry contact. The source of that person’s infection has still not been determined.

The wastewater findings come as the virus spreads in California’s dairy cows — which now make up more than half the nation’s reported cattle infections — and as fall migration of wild birds from the Arctic moves south along the Pacific Flyway.

There are now two strains of H5N1 bird flu circulating in California. The form circulating in dairy cows is known by scientists as B3.13. A new wild bird version, which has emerged only recently, is known as D1.1 or D1.2.

Genetic sequencing of the H5 virus found in Los Angeles County wastewater has not been conducted. According to De St. Maurice, the way the samples are captured and identified does not allow for sequencing.

H5 viruses are of bird origin; they are not human viruses.

In a statement, officials said people could reduce their risk of infection by avoiding raw milk, raw cheese and undercooked meats. Pasteurization and adequate cooking inactivates the virus.

They also recommend that people avoid unprotected contact with sick or dead animals, and avoid materials contaminated with bird feces. Pets can also be infected in these ways. And officials request that people report sick or dead birds to local animal control agencies.

They also recommend that people get the annual flu shot. Though the seasonal flu vaccination won’t prevent bird flu infection, it reduces the chances for the bird flu to combine with a human flu — potentially creating a new virus that could spread more easily among people.

Whether its lead from old buildings, arsenic from contaminated food or strontium fallout from a nuclear explosion, heavy metals that enter the body pose a serious health threat.

With chemical properties exceedingly similar to typical nutrients like iron and calcium, toxic metals look virtually the same to the body. So, it starts incorporating the toxic elements into the skeleton, liver and brain.

Saving a patient requires removing the sparse toxic metals from the body with more than surgical precision, while leaving the abundant life-sustaining nutrients intact.

For many toxic elements, doctors have few options.

Now, a startup spun out of UC Berkeley and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory hopes to change that.

Recently, HOPO Therapeutics won a nearly $10-million initial contract from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The research authority is tasked with developing defenses against major public health threats, such as a pandemic or a chemical weapons attack.

“This is a priority for [the authority] — the development of new products that can be used to address these types of threats,” said Julian Rees, chief executive of HOPO Therapeutics, who started working on the drug at Berkeley Lab. “So, it’s been really exciting for us to partner with BARDA.”

Since BARDA was created by Congress in 2006, it’s supported 61 drugs through the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process. The authority also played an essential role in Operation Warp Speed to develop the COVID-19 vaccine.

HOPO Therapeutics’ drugs are designed to chemically bond with toxic metals only. By bonding, the medicine transforms the reactive metals into benign molecules that have little interest in interacting with different compounds in the body. The body can then easily excrete the metals.

Currently, few of these types of drugs — called chelators, derived from the Greek word for claw — are approved by the FDA. Those select few that have been approved have a hard time distinguishing between toxic metals and essential nutrients.

“HOPO chelators are extremely promising in that regard,” said Justin Wilson, a biochemistry professor at UC Santa Barbara who studies chelators and was not involved in HOPO Therapeutics work. “What the data show is that they have a very high selectivity for radioactive elements” over essential metals like zinc and calcium.

The HOPO chelators could potentially fill a crucial gap in lead poisoning treatment.

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says a concentration of 3.5 micrograms of lead for every deciliter of blood constitutes lead poisoning, it doesn’t recommend treatment to remove lead until the concentration reaches over 45 micrograms, because of the adverse effects of existing treatments.

“So, there’s this huge window of people — primarily children — who have lead poisoning, but there’s no treatment available,” Rees said.

Lead poisoning can result in brain function impairment, fatigue, weight loss, paralysis and even death. It disproportionately affects children, whose bodies seek extra calcium — which lead can be mistaken as — to build bones.

Current chelators designed to treat lead poisoning can also remove essential metals such as calcium and zinc. If the concentration of lead is too low, the drugs would remove too much natural metal before putting a sizable dent in the amount of lead in the body.

Treating radiation poisoning is harder. Lead is a single element, but there’s a whole suite of elements with radioactive forms.

For radioactive elements, “there’s no real common denominator. … They belong to all different kinds of chemical families,” said Ira Helfand, past president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

“People who are exposed to these … are in big trouble and are liable to radiation sickness, liable to cancer down the road if they survive post-exposure.”

In a complex and messy real-world nuclear or radioactive disaster, Helfand said, HOPO’s medicine could serve only as a small part of the armor against radiation.

Much of the harm inflicted on victims of a nuclear strike — or nuclear plant catastrophe — comes from high-velocity radiation particles that pierce the body, damaging cells and their DNA. Only a small fraction of the injuries come from heavy metals that emit radiation from within the body.

And even then, some of the most abundant radioactive metals in nuclear fallout are particularly good at mimicking nutrients in the body, making it too difficult for the HOPO chelators to isolate them.

Instead, HOPO’s drug, which can target uranium and plutonium — elements found in nuclear weapons before they detonate — is better equipped to protect bomb makers, nuclear plant operators and victims of “dirty bombs,” conventional explosions that scatter radioactive material to harm bystanders.

Although state-of-the-art chelators approved by the FDA often need to be injected via an IV, HOPO drugs could be taken orally.

“If you think about the setting in which you want to apply this — where would you be getting exposed to radioactive elements? Typically some emergency situation,” Wilson said. “Having something on the field where you can take this as a pill very rapidly I think is a really big advantage.”

HOPO Therapeutics said the initial contract could be extended to more than $226 million, should development go well. The next steps for the company include demonstrating that the drug could be easily manufactured in large quantities — not just small samples for the lab — and human trials to study potential negative side effects.

The company’s ultimate goal is FDA approval.