A: To clean up bad credit if you have black marks on your report from old debt, order a free credit report at http://www.annualcreditreport.com. If any information is inaccurate or incomplete, file a dispute with all three credit bureaus — instructions for this are in the report.

If the credit bureaus cannot confirm the incorrect information within 30 days, it will be removed. If the credit bureaus do confirm the information, try contacting the creditor, who may be willing to contact the credit bureaus and tell them to delete the item if you pay off the debt.

(The report shows contact information for all your creditors.) Trap: If the creditor doesn’t contact the credit bureaus — and it doesn’t have to — the information will stay on your credit report for seven years. If you write to a creditor and do not hear back within 30 days, you can then contact the credit bureaus again and ask them to remove the negative information.

Thanks for the info about Henrieta Lacks. But you left out a key, perhaps very important fact. She was a poor BLACK woman who lived in a time when blacks were little more than free scientific experiences to white America.

Thank you for bringing this article to our attention. I have heard that she did not die from the causes we have been told. She was being told that she had cancer but she was being brought in and they were systematically taking her parts from her to be used in research.

They did this until it was necessary to take whole organs. Then she was lied to and told that she had terminal cancer. Her parts were removed and her family was provided with a body from the Johns Hopkins pool of donated corpses.

The whereabouts of her body is still in doubt. It is rumored that it is still alive and functioning.

It seems that white neurosis disease is more dangerous than first notice.

Evelyn