West Kentucky Soybean Farmer Jed Clark, like many Ohio Valley farmers, is in a tighter financial situation because tariffs from the trade war and market forces have depressed crop prices.
“We’ve had a collapse in our grain markets,” Clark said. “We’re seeing some of the lowest commodity prices for wheat we’ve seen in a long time.”
The Trump administration’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2020 would cut U.S. Department of Agriculture funding by 15 percent. That includes a proposal to reduce the amount of subsidies farmers receive to afford crop insurance, which can cost thousands of dollars depending on the crop. Farmers would have to pay for 52 percent of their crop insurance instead of 38 percent.
“Taking that subsidy away and having a ten percent increase [in insurance cost] over quite a few acres has to be quite a bit of money,” Clark said. “Anytime we start increasing and putting more burden on the family farms to do this, it hurts the family farms.”
USDA data show farmers in Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia in 2018 received more than $240 million dollars total in crop insurance subsidies.
University of Kentucky Department of Agricultural Economics Dean Barry Barnett said the cut in crop insurance subsidies is surprising to him given Trump’s vocal support for farmers, but it isn’t anything new.
“This really isn’t a partisan thing,” Barnett said. “It’s really been more of a situation where administrations have been proposing these budget cuts for several years now, and Congressional appropriators have refused to go along with those proposed cuts.”
Also earmarked for elimination is the Rural Economic Development Loan and Grant Program, also known as REDLG. The program gives up to $300,000 grants to local utility companies that then use the funding to give loans to rural businesses and communities to help them expand.
Loan recipients then pay back the low-interest loans to the utility, which the utility can then use to give out more loans, what’s known as a “revolving loan fund.”
Midwest Electric Cooperative CEO Matt Berry in northwest Ohio said they’ve received three grants from REDLG over the past 20 years worth $750,000 dollars.
He said the money has helped jump-start businesses including a local brewery, an ice cream shop and a company that makes standing desks. He estimates more than 300 jobs have been created from funded projects and that the program is a “no-brainer.”
“I hope it’s just a lack of understanding on the administration’s part because they may be just looking at the initial cost and not the full impact of the program,” Berry said. “It’s a huge benefit.”
Berry said because this is just a proposal, he hopes Congress will reject the elimination later this year.
The Trump Administration released on Monday details of a 2020 federal budget proposal that includes cutting funds allotted for a new federal prison in eastern Kentucky. The funds would be redirected to other law-enforcement or natural security priorities, potentially including a wall at the southern U.S. border.
The proposed cut rebukes arguments made by Congressman Hal Rogers, the powerful Kentucky Republican who has promoted federal prisons as economic development for communities struggling with high unemployment.
Rogers sits on the powerful House Appropriations Committee. In a written statement to the Ohio Valley ReSource, Rogers called the Trump administration’s reduction in funding a “gimmick.”
“The bottom line is that the Letcher County Prison remains on track for completion and I plan to continue advocating for it, along with other critical programs and agencies that have been proposed for reduction or elimination,” Rogers said in the statement.
The $510-million facility has faced serious opposition from local and national activists who say the prison is not necessary and would not bring significant economic benefits to the struggling region.
“Prisons don’t bring the kind of economic development that Hal Rogers and others suggest that they will,” said Judah Schept, a professor of justice studies at Eastern Kentucky University and one of the prison project’s vocal critics. “The necessary and just transition that Appalachia needs and deserves won’t come from building prisons.”
The administration’s budget proposal echoes many of the activists’ arguments, saying the prison is costly compared to other facilities. It also points out that Rogers’ claims that prisons bring economic development are not founded in fact. “Prison construction largely does not provide economic growth in rural counties, and in fact, may impede it,” the proposal said.
The arguments in the budget proposal may bolster a lawsuit filed on behalf of federal prisoners against the Bureau of Prisons alleging that the agency was pursuing the project “without a reasonable and legal justification.”
“Federal legislation indicates a downward trend in prison population,” said Emily Posner, an attorney in the suit, in a 2018 press release. “My clients are in agreement with local residents who feel that there are much better ways to generate federal support in Appalachian communities than wasting hundreds of millions on an unnecessary prison.”
The 2020 budget proposal also includes sharp cuts to education, housing and urban development, and international spending.
The cut to USP Letcher’s funding will likely face opposition in the Congress, which controls federal spending levels.
Sue Meeks has worked with children for years as a registered nurse.
Meeks manages the family navigator program at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine in Athens, Ohio.
Several years ago, she started noticing three and four-year-olds coming into the program with certain distinctive behaviors.
“Children that appear to be neurologically very overstimulated,” she said. “They often aren’t social in your typical way. They don’t respond to trying to calm them or trying to divert their attention to something else, laughing with them, or getting a response from reading.”
She saw delays in language and motor development. The symptoms did not line up with the typical presentation of autism or ADHD for children of that age.
But there was a common denominator: exposure to drugs in the womb.
Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome, or NAS, is the result of severe in-utero drug exposure. It has hit the Ohio Valley hard with more than 16,000 babies affected over the past five years in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia.
Credit Ohio River Valley Addiction Research Consortium
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Ohio River Valley Addiction Research Consortium
A Univ. of Kentucky researchers’ images of infants with NAS symptoms.
West Virginia, for example, has one of the highest rates in the nation with more than 5 percent of babies born diagnosed with NAS in 2017.
Specialists rushed to help these children when they were born. Advancements in treatment have helped relieve withdrawal symptoms for both mother and baby. Now researchers are turning attention to the potential long-term effects. Researchers especially want to better understand how NAS affects the ability to learn so that parents, schools, and communities are prepared to help these children reach their developmental milestones.
Complicated Problem
“It’s a multi-pronged mystery that I’m not sure that we will ever totally solve,” Meeks said.
The research can become complicated because not every child exposed to substances in the womb is diagnosed with NAS, and the severity of NAS symptoms varies from child to child.
Health experts can’t say for sure if developmental delays can be attributed to drug exposure, other factors, or genetics.
“There are many children in our general population that have [neurological disorders],” Meeks said. “So how much can you attribute to the drug use and how much was going to be there anyway?”
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Ohio University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital operate an NAS clinic in Athens, Ohio, to research how often NAS causes long-term effects, and also how different drugs affect development.
Early research has mostly focused on opioids.
One of the first studies came from Australia in 2017, where researchers compared the academic progress of 2234 students who had a history of prenatal drug exposure with a group of students with similar demographics but not born with NAS.
The mean test scores of the children born drug-affected were lower than those of their counterparts. The results worsened as the students aged into high school.
Researchers in Tennessee more recently released a study in September that analyzed close to 7,200 children aged 3 to 8 enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program. That study found 1 in 7 children with a history of opioid exposure in the womb required services for developmental delays.
Development delays possibly related to other substances, however, did not seem to affect a child the same way as NAS caused by opioids did, according to Meeks.
“Not to say everything else has gone away, but we’ve seen an uptick in meth use,” Meeks said. “I can’t say it’s more dangerous to the infant, because we don’t know that, but it’s very detrimental.”
A increase in the use of opioids mixed with multiple substances has also complicated the issue as researchers work to figure out how that affects long-term development.
Ohio University is also a part of the Ohio River Valley Addiction Research Consortium, a group of colleges and universities, along with health professionals, law enforcement, social workers and advocates.
Credit Aaron Payne / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
A regional research consortium focuses on NAS.
The consortium chose to focus on NAS as the first issue for their collaborative research.
OU played host to the group at its most recent meeting in November to discuss the latest research and discuss how they can better study long term-effects.
They hope to work together as this generation of children enters the public school system.
“Everybody knows in the next five to 10 years the school population is going to look very different,” Meeks said.
A Parent’s Perspective
Molly Sawyer is a doctoral candidate in education at Miami University, Ohio, and has 20 years experience as an educator from Montgomery County, Ohio.
She focuses on long term-effects of NAS and best practices for educators to help affected students navigate the school system.
The region’s public schools might face a tough challenge, according to Sawyer.
“I still think we’re trying to figure out right now, at this point in time, how are elementary age students affected?”
Sawyer is uniquely qualified to tackle this subject. She doesn’t just research the issue, she lives it as a foster and adoptive parent. One of her adopted sons was exposed to opioids in the womb.
Credit Courtesy Molly Sawyer
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Molly Sawyer has worked on NAS issues as a teacher, researcher, and parent.
She was inspired to pursue her study when she noticed that some of the research on NAS was lining up with the experience with her son.
“He was a great baby but just was experiencing the world a little different as an infant, and needed us to care for him and respond in a different way,” Sawyer said.
She draws on her studies and six years of experience with her son to help the local school system understand these students and what educators can do.
“The students may not acquire skills the same way others do,” she said. “So, more repetition, more time on task, more one-on-one with teachers may be needed.”
There are also programs that create trauma-informed schools. Teachers learn what these children have gone through and how it can possibly change their brain structure.
Medical professionals can also help these children in the classroom, according to Sawyer’s personal experience, by helping them manage behavioral issues like impulsiveness and hyperactivity.
“For him, there is no off switch,” she said. “There’s nothing you shouldn’t do or touch. There’s just nothing about him that tells him to slow down and think.”
Ultimately, Sawyer is optimistic about the school system’s ability to handle this issue as long as teachers continue to be willing to learn and create relationships with students who may just need extra attention.
Mother and Child Reunion
Elsewhere, treatment and recovery programs work to help mother and baby together.
Project Hope for Women and Children in Huntington, West Virginia, is a residential facility where mothers struggling with addiction can live with their children as they get help.
“We’re building healthy attachments,” Lyn O’Connell, Associate Director of Addiction Sciences for Marshall Health, said. “We’re allowing mom to be there for those developmental milestones so she’s not building more guilt from being disconnected.”
Marshall Health operates Project Hope in partnership with the Huntington City Mission. The program’s goal is to fill the gaps in care for mothers with substance use disorders.
Evidence-based treatment, recovery programs, job training, housing, and parenting courses are just some of what Project Hope offers to mothers. They are also invested in the health of the children, monitoring them for developmental delays.
If a child appears to struggle with meeting a milestone, the staff will instruct the mother how to help.
“Maybe she can encourage more reading in the evening, or maybe they need to help with crawling,” O’Connell said. “We’re helping to strategize to meet those developmental goals. Because we’re not just focused on mom, we’re focused on mom as a parent.”
Project Hope just opened its doors in December and now has seven families living in the 18- apartment complex.
The goal for now is to bring in more families to the Huntington location and then later look into expansion to other regions.
Overcoming Stigma
Children and mothers affected by NAS also face challenges from the stigma attached to substance use disorders. Treatment experts hope the country has learned lessons from a previous epidemic.
The rise of cocaine use in the 1980s and 1990s came with a societal worry over “crack babies.” Women struggling with cocaine addiction and their children, predominantly people of color and low socioeconomic status, were subject to shame and ridicule.
Research showed that predictions about prenatal cocaine exposure were overstated, but the stigma still had an impact.
“This moral panic may prevent mothers who use drugs from accessing prenatal care because they are afraid of being judged or mistreated by medical professionals, or of being forced into the child welfare system,” according to the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration.
Specialists around the Ohio Valley urge the public to keep this in mind when discussing mothers and children of the opioid crisis.
“Infants are not born addicted, they’re born with exposure,” O’Connell said. “We don’t want the narrative continuing throughout that child’s life that they were a ‘drug baby.’”
Researchers may not know how many children will experience the long-term effects of prenatal drug exposure or the challenges they will face.
But there are people around the Ohio Valley ready to embrace them and help them overcome those challenges.
“What we want to do is set them up for success,” O’Connell said. “Early intervention is key.”
Cyndi Kirkhart has some 26 thousand square feet of warehouse space at the Facing Hunger Food Bank in Huntington, West Virginia, where she is executive director. That sounds like a lot of space. But very little of it is cooler space.
“This is the only cooler we have,” Kirkhart said, stepping into a walk-in cooler the size of a large closet filled with half-gallon containers of milk. “This is Kentucky milk, and this is West Virginia.”
She said her operation has been receiving about 8 thousand of these containers, about a truck load, every couple of weeks since November. She expects to continue receiving the products from the federal government through March.
“What I can’t get in the cooler, I’m loading onto trucks,” she said, where she uses the diesel engines to run refrigeration units overnight.
Donations from the federal government are normal. But those products are usually non-perishable items with a long shelf life. With milk, they have about two weeks before it sours.
“We never have received what we refer to as ‘fluid milk,’ fresh milk,” she said.
Across the country, milk is flooding into food banks like this one as the federal government buys surplus milk from dairy farmers in order to help mitigate lost sales due to trade disputes and over production. Free milk for food banks sounds nice. But as economists say, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And food banks are finding that this “free” milk is a mixed blessing as storing and distributing perishable items drives up their administrative costs.
Milky Weigh
“Whose responsibility is it to get rid of this milk?”Joshua Lohnes asked.
Lohnes is a Ph.D. candidate and co-founder/Food Policy Director of West Virginia University’s Food Justice Lab. He’s been researching the relationship between industrial food operations, the federal government, and emergency food providers like Facing Hunger.
The dairy industry is already producing a lot of surplus milk. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports milk production has increased by 13 percent over the last decade, while overall milk consumption has only increased 5 percent in that time. Lohnes explains that recent trade disputes made the situation worse.
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broacasting
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West Virginia Public Broacasting
Milk is wrapped, then loaded and distributed to smaller food banks throughout West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southeastern Ohio.
“Across the Midwest there’s all of this waste and excess that isn’t being shipped because of retaliatory tariffs,” he said. “The Trump Administration released $12 billion to bail out those farmers, $1.2 billion was put toward purchasing commodities and distributing as hunger relief.”
Since the federal purchases started in August the government has bought more than $50 million worth of milk and shipped it to food banks. But the food doesn’t come with any help to offset extra administrative costs.
“They haven’t been given any money to distribute that milk,” Lohnes said. “It costs the food banks $2 a mile to distribute this ‘free food’ across this vast rural landscape.”
Lohnes said food aid groups are talking with state legislators and the Department of Agriculture about ways to absorb the surplus milk.
“To try to figure out, you know, how to not have all of this surplus, pretty much tank their operation,” he said.
Food Mismatch
In a recent article in the journal Environment and Planning, Lohnes argues that government policies have effectively put food banks in a position to serve needs of industrial food operations. He says those policies ultimately do little to address core issues that lead to food insecurity.
“Food banks across the country are now recovering 4.5 billion pounds of food every year both from government sources and from corporate sources,” he said. That use of surplus or waste food is called “food recovery.” But while that “recovered” food has been flowing into food banks, measures of food insecurity have varied widely. “Sometimes they’re up, sometimes they’re down,” he said. “So food recovery doesn’t actually correlate at all to reducing hunger.”
Credit Glynis Board / West Virginia Public Broacasting
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West Virginia Public Broacasting
The food bank warehouse is best suited for non-perishable items.
He said surplus commodities have always been used to try to balance out food waste and hunger. “But it became the responsibility of civil society to figure out how to do that,” he said. “The burden of redistributing government commodities was laid on the shoulders of civil society.”
In the journal article Lohnes points out that food banks provide tax relief for food corporations and offer a “vent” for dealing with corporate food waste. But it’s not the corporations paying to operate the food banks. “They are primarily funded by community-based organizations who are themselves stretched thin by economic crises within their own locales,” he writes.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
“Whatever it takes.”
In Huntington, Kirkhart said her organization doesn’t have to accept the milk donations. But she knows 285,000 people throughout West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and southeastern Ohio face food insecurity. It goes against every value of these very mission-driven people to decline food donations because of logistical difficulties.
Credit Courtesy Cyndi Kirkhart
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Courtesy Cyndi Kirkhart
Cyndi Kirkhart and a crew member delivering food
“We have to do some juggling sometimes,” she said, but her team will “do whatever it takes.”
Food banks like hers do get some reimbursements from the federal government for administrative costs, but they don’t match the increases in overhead expenses created by perishable donations. To complicate matters further, the federal government shutdown delayed those reimbursements.
“We have been advised that administrative funding from January forward is not available,” she said.
Despite those difficulties Kirkhart is confident her team and community will find a way to keep providing a much needed service.
“We’re gonna keep on keeping on,” she said. “I know that we have a lot of love throughout our service area, and people will help us through. Because that’s what Appalachians do.”
Just a few months ago, the U.S. coal mining industry was on track for its safest year in history. But in an eleven-day span in late December, three miners died after separate incidents, bringing the total number of fatalities in 2018 to 12, even as coal mining employment continued its decline.
“It is a reminder to enforcement agencies and companies who are responsible for miner safety that you always have to be vigilant, you can never let up your guard,” Kentucky lawyer and mine safety advocate Tony Oppegard said.
Despite that grim end to 2018, federal mine safety records show the number of fatalities in U.S. coal mines last year tied the second-lowest mark on record. Twelve miners died in 2015. The lowest number of fatalities for a year came in 2016, when 8 miners were killed. Fifteen miners were killed on the job in 2017.
The numbers are low compared to just a little more than a decade ago, when dozens of miners perished year after year. The mining industry and the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration, or MSHA, point to improvements in mine safety practices.
However, the number of miners employed was also lower in 2018. Preliminary data from MSHA indicate total coal mine employment in 2018 reached the lowest level in the industry’s modern history. Oppegard said he thinks that is the primary reason for the reduction in deaths.
“I think the low number says more about the decline of the coal industry,” Oppegard said. “Certainly in Appalachia there’s about one-fifth the number of mines that are operating today than were in operation five or six years ago. So I think that’s the major reason.”
A comparison of mining employment and fatalities demonstrates Oppegard’s point. In 2009, for example, the total annual fatalities fell below 20 for the first time in industry history. When 18 miners were killed in that year, the industry employed roughly 134,000, for a death rate of 13.4 per 100,000 workers.
The unofficial employment figures for 2018 show just 80,762 employed by coal operators and contracting companies. That means the death rate for 2018, at 14.8, was slightly higher than in 2009.
Mine safety and health made news in 2018 in other ways that safety advocates found worrisome, as the Trump administration’s leadership at MSHA made controversial decisions and the toll from Appalachia’s epidemic of black lung disease continued to mount.
Credit U.S. Mine Health & Safety Administration
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A 34-year-old miner was crushed when a vehicle turned over in the Oaktown Fuels Mine, in Terre Haute, Ind.
‘Troubling Development’
In December, the United Mine Workers of America sued MSHA after the agency reduced its heightened oversight of a West Virginia coal mine with a poor safety record.
The suit has to do with MSHA’s use of its power to declare mines with a history of significant safety violations as having a “Pattern of Violations.” Known as “POV status,” the declaration is an enforcement tool that allows the agency to increase regulatory scrutiny at a mine.
That was the case with the Pocahontas Coal Company’s Affinity mine in southern West Virginia in 2013. Under the Obama administration, MSHA placed Affinity on POV status after two miners were killed in separate incidents within a two-week span.
This year, under the Trump administration, MSHA decided to remove POV status for the Affinity mine in an agreement with the company that resolved litigation on the matter, despite a continued record of spotty safety performance at the mine.
The decision raised questions about MSHA director David Zatezalo’s connections to the mining industry. Zatezalo is a former coal company executive who also served on state coal associations involved in litigation against MSHA over its use of POV status.
“That’s a troubling development,” Oppegard said. “It shows me MSHA, under this administration, is willing to give sweetheart deals to coal companies.”
Also in December, an NPR investigation found that the surging epidemic of black lung among Central Appalachian miners had topped 2,000 known cases of the most severe form of the disease.
The incoming Democratic chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, said he will call hearings on black lung in the new Congress.
“Congress has no choice but to step in and direct MSHA and the mining industry to take timely action,” Scott said in a statement.
MSHA declined to make an official available for an interview for this story.
‘Personal Tragedies’
Four of the twelve coal mining fatalities in 2018 took place in mines in West Virginia and three in Pennsylvania. Other fatalities were in Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky, and Washington.
MSHA records show the miners were killed during a range of work in both surface and underground mines, and the incidents included deaths from electrocution, crushing, rock falls, fires, and powered haulage of personnel and materials. In at least two cases miners died in mishaps while riding in the personnel carriers that either flipped or collided with mine equipment.
Credit U.S. Mine Safety & Health Administration
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A rock fall killed a 52-year old miner at Arch Coal’s Sentinel Mine in Barbour County, W.Va.
Oppegard said that even while coal mining employment decreases, each working miner still deserves a safe work environment. He added that while MSHA defines a “mining disaster” as an event that kills five or more, each individual fatality brings personal tragedy.
“Each one of those deaths was a disaster to that family,” he said.
Health officials are tracking record-breaking rates of sexually transmitted disease, including a resurgence of some infections which had been considered rare, such as gonorrhea and syphilis. These STDs are on the rise amid cuts to public health budgets dedicated to testing, prevention, and public outreach.
In the Ohio Valley, for example, a review of state and federal government data shows some communities in Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia have seen chlamydia infections rise by more than 200 percent between 2011 and 2017. And in four counties in Kentucky and West Virginia, reported cases of gonorrhea jumped by an astonishing 1,000 percent or more in that period.
Matt Prior is the spokesperson for the non-profit National Coalition of STD Directors. They are the folks on the front lines. Prior says STDs now represent a public health crisis, especially in parts of Appalachia already struggling with an opioid epidemic.
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Officials are concerned about antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea.
“We are seeing an increasing number of syphilis and other STD outbreaks associated with the opioid crisis,” he said. “States that are particularly hard hit by the opioid crisis are states that are particularly hard hit by the STD epidemic.”
As rates go up, Prior said, funding has gone down. So while STDs have increased by 30 percent in the last five years to reach an all-time high, the amount of federal money for prevention and education has consistently gone down since 2003. Prior says that federal funding is critical for states like Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio.
“The federal STD prevention line is the only line or funding streams these states have so it is really the first and last line of defense,” he said.
According to the report, the number of babies born with syphilis rose from 362 in 2013 to 918 in 2017. The cases were primarily found in Western and Southern states. In the report, Dr. Jonathan Mermin, director of CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention, said syphilis can result “in miscarriage, newborn death, and severe lifelong physical and mental health problems.”
Syphilis during pregnancy is easily cured with the right antibiotics. However, if left untreated, a pregnant woman with syphilis has up to an 80 percent chance of passing it on to her baby, the report said.
Prior said the mortality rate among those infected infants is high. His coalition is encouraging syphilis screening as a mandatory test during a woman’s first prenatal visit. He said this outbreak shows the depth of the need for access to preventative care and prenatal care.
“It is essentially a failure of the public health system and a failure for our nation because we should not see mothers and children, children dying for very easily treatable and identifiable diseases,” he said.
“It’s Frightening”
Jim Thacker is the spokesperson for the Health Department in Madison County, Kentucky. He said public health officials expect spikes in infectious disease. Adapting to the changes and responding to them is the core mission of public health.
But, he said, the recent resurgence of diseases such as chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis is something different. Overall the CDC reported 2.4 million new cases of those diseases in 2017. Thacker said a handful of cases in Madison County reflected a 300 percent jump in syphilis.
Credit Courtesy Madison Co. Health Dept
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Jim Thacker of the Madison Co. Health Dept
“It’s frightening any time you see something come back that you thought you had under control,” he said. Syphilis, he said, was essentially eradicated for more than 50 years.
Thacker added that discussing sexually transmitted disease makes people uncomfortable. “It’s not something people want to talk about,” he said.
In recent months he increased his efforts to speak to middle, high school, and college students about STDs. Thacker said part of the increase in STDs could be linked to a lack of fear of HIV among people born after the AIDS epidemic. That and effective, long-term birth control makes condom use seem less urgent to teens and young adults.
If provided with the correct information, Thacker said, people can change their minds. If they get tested they can avoid the most serious consequences of the diseases.
Thacker said many younger people know very little about some of the STDs that are now resurgent, including the symptoms. He said by the time they are diagnosed significant damage can occur. Untreated syphilis, for example, can cause serious neurological disease. And untreated gonorrhea can cause serious health problems, particularly for women, including chronic pelvic pain, life-threatening ectopic pregnancy and infertility.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Thacker said health officials are also concerned about the possibility that gonorrhea is becoming drug resistant. According to the CDC gonorrhea has become resistant to a series of drugs, beginning with penicillin.
Get Tested
People between the ages of 15 and 25 have the highest rates of STDs, representing 40 percent of the new cases, according to the CDC.
Eastern Kentucky University student Priscillana Cawood is also working to educate her peers. She takes STDs seriously.
Credit Mary Meehan / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Priscillana Cawood is majoring in infectious diseases at Eastern Kentucky University.
“On my personal social media, I follow the CDC and various health departments. I like to keep up to date,” she said.
Cawood’s major focus of study is infectious disease and she’s the daughter of a straight-talking nurse. That combination could explain why she has long been “the friend.” She’s the one among her peers that friends turn to for information about STDs. It’s a role she’s played since middle school. She understands it’s common for young people to push their sexual boundaries. But she tries to help people know there can be consequences.
Especially when first at college or out on their own, people can be reckless, she said.
“Some people take extreme advantage of that and they end up with a disease that they don’t want or never intended to get because A) they didn’t know all the facts, B) they were careless,” she said.
Credit Alexandra Kanik / Ohio Valley ReSource
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Ohio Valley ReSource
Cawood is also an intern at the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department where she sometimes assists with testing. She understands there can be a mental block to getting tested.
“Sometimes you need just need to know the answer but you don’t want to know it,” she said.
She still encourages everyone to get tested on a regular basis.
For information on STD testing check with your primary care doctor, on-campus clinic or local public health department.
