A coalition of Hampton Roads state legislators is lining up behind the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.The 33 members of the General Assembly collectively known…
A coalition of Hampton Roads state legislators is lining up behind the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
The 33 members of the General Assembly collectively known as the Hampton Roads Caucus expressed their backing for the massive natural gas project in a letter to Virginia’s U.S. senators, Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.
The pipeline would deliver natural gas from West Virginia and through Virginia and into North Carolina, covering more than 550 miles. The $5 billion energy project is backed by Dominion Resources and other energy companies.
In the letter, the caucus says the region’s natural gas transportation system has “reached a tipping point.” Members describe the pipeline as necessary for the region’s economy.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is reviewing the project.
The Virginia Department of Health, Mount Rogers Health District is offering cholesterol clinics to residents in Bland, Carroll, Grayson, Smyth, Washington and Wythe counties and the cities of Bristol and Galax.
High cholesterol is one of the major risk factors leading to cardiovascular disease, according to the American Heart Association. In the United States, heart disease continues to be the number one killer for both men and women.
The clinics will be available at all district health department locations.
According to a press release, screenings – and their related fees – are as follows:
Bone Density (Evaluation of heel by ultrasound technology) – $10
Other lab services are available by request.
Screenings will be done in a mobile health unit parked outside of the health department. Please call to make an appointment. Dates, locations and phone numbers are:
Wed., Feb. 24 – Washington Co. Health Dept., 15068 Lee Highway, Suite 1000, Bristol, Va., 276-676-5604
In June of 2007, Victoria Snyder, then age-nine, attended a week-long church camp. During the week she began to feel sick – muscle aches, lethargy, headaches. A doctor at the camp thought it might be the flu, but she didn’t get better. So after camp, her mother, Christine, took her to see a pediatrician.
“The pediatrician found a bullseye ring on her stomach,” said Christine. “I felt a lot of relief when they put her on antibiotics because with Lyme disease, we knew what we were dealing with.”
In 2007, there were only 84 confirmed cases of Lyme Disease in West Virginia – most of which were in the Snyder’s county, Berkeley. Seven years later, that number almost doubled to 136. The next year, 2015, it doubled again.
“The number of cases are increasing,” said West Virginia University pediatric infectious disease specialist Kathy Moffett. “It’s not that we haven’t diagnosed it before, it’s that it hasn’t been here before.”
Moffett said experts think that the mountains in eastern West Virginia have long been a barrier against the ticks (West Virginia’s border states of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia all have high levels of Lyme).
Others disagree, saying Lyme has always been in West Virginia, it just wasn’t well diagnosed.
“I can tell you I don’t think there’s a great wall of West Virginia and all these ticks stop at these borders. It’s rampant in Virginia, it’s rampant in Pennsylvania, it’s rampant here,” said Doctor Erika Pallie, a West Virginia-based physician who used to work for WVU.
“The presumption is that for some reason West Virginia still doesn’t have Lyme disease,” she said. “I would propose this is a self-fulling fallacy. Doctors are told there’s no Lyme disease here, therefore they refuse to test people for it, therefore they don’t find it, therefore they don’t report it.”
Nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention registers about 300,000 new cases of Lyme disease each year. More than 96 percent of those cases are being reported in 14 states. (West Virginia does not yet officially make that list, although if trends continue, it might in the coming years.)
The Lyme Controversy
Doctors Pallie and Moffett have both seen and treated Lyme in West Virginia. But they view the disease in very different ways.
Moffett adheres to the Infectious Disease Society of America’s recommended guidelines for Lyme, which basically state that Lyme is hard to get and easy to treat.
Pallie, who has personally had Lyme, believes that the IDSA’s definition of Lyme is too narrow. Rather, she follows guidelines from the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, which state there are more than 100 strains of the bacteria that cause Lyme in the United States. Therefore, a cocktail of antibiotics (rather than a single round of one) may be needed to treat Lyme.
The International Lyme Society’s research has also indicated that the official, primary, test used for the disease is only about 65 percent sensitive. So when possible, Pallie would order a different one. (Other, more sensitive tests are generally not covered by insurance as preliminary screening.)
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A classic bullseye rash, which often indicates Lyme disease.
But Moffett defends the IDSA’s guidelines saying, “[T]hese [guidelines] have been studied very closely and carefully to look at the science behind how accurate these tests are – are they valid and the science says they are valid. There are a minority of people who feel that their disease may not be accurately diagnosed who are looking for answers of symptoms that may have nothing to do with Lyme.”
For several years, those minority of patients flooded Pallie’s clinic in Morgantown.
“When you come down to it, I believe patients have the right to be informed of the risks of their alternative choices,” said Pallie. She said she told her patients “[L]ook this is the deal. This is what you have, this is the infectious disease standard of care and the ILADS standard of care, and these are the risks of this treatment.”
Pallie said eventually her supervisors at WVU asked her to stop diagnosing and treating Lyme or sending out any more specialty tests. Instead, Pallie says, she was instructed to send patients she suspected had Lyme to the infectious disease specialists at WVU.
Pallie says she understands that decision since she was hired as a family doctor, not a Lyme disease specialist. Nevertheless, she resigned from her position at WVU because she thought it was unethical not to treat patients she really did think have Lyme.
Still Sick? It Must Not Be Lyme
For one thing, many of the patients Pallie saw had stories like Victoria Snyder’s. Back in 2007, after her first round of antibiotics, Victoria didn’t get better. By November of that year, Christine took Victoria to an infectious disease specialist in Winchester, Virginia, who recommended that she be admitted to hospital and given six weeks of intravenous antibiotics.
“When she finished the IV antibiotics, she definitely had less of the cloudy thinking – we were just hoping that her energy would catch up,” said Christine.
It never did. Victoria is now 17 and a senior in high school. She tests negative for the bacteria that causes Lyme, but most days, it is all she can do to get out of bed and get through the school day.
Christine said the doctors she took Victoria to said “she was cured of Lyme disease and it was official. They weren’t willing to look into what other issues might be causing the fatigue.”
Christine also said her insurance refused to continue paying for treatments since Victoria no longer tested positive for Lyme. But she doesn’t see how the current health issues Victoria is having could not be related to Lyme. ”Victoria was a normal, high energy, 9-year-old kid. There was a change in her and it has never been the same since she got sick,” she said.
According to the Infectious Disease Society, there is no such thing as chronic Lyme disease. WVU’s Moffett said continuing to treat for Lyme when there’s no evidence of the disease may be masking the true problem. Also, she said, prescribing months of antibiotics may do more harm than good. But for patients like Victoria and doctors like Pallie, the question remains: If they are cured, why are they still sick?
Despite their differences, both Pallie and Moffett agree that Lyme disease is being diagnosed at a higher rate in West Virginia. They also both say that’s it’s preventable and that the best way to tackle Lyme disease is to take steps (such as wearing pants, checking for ticks during the warm months, and wearing bug spray) that keep that the bite from happening in the first place.
Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting, with support from the Benedum Foundation.
Since 1986, legislators from the Eastern Panhandle have been meeting with their fellow lawmakers from what they call the quad-state region – Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania – to discuss issues as well as accomplishments they share along the interstate 81 corridor. This year, the group focused on drug trafficking and what the four states can do to combat the problem.
Almost two-dozen legislators hailing from the four states met Friday to discuss the issues and achievements they share because of the closeness of their districts. They all live within minutes of each other thanks to interstate 81, which quickly connects the quad-state region.
The legislators invited many officials from their respective communities to speak about current and future projects the states are working on – from economic development to casino gaming to bridge building – all projects that connect the four states in some way. But there was one discussion that lasted longer than any other – drug trafficking.
In the Eastern Panhandle, Martinsburg is the leader in heroin overdoses. In fact, Berkeley County has the second highest number of heroin related deaths in the state just following Cabell County. Much of the heroin in the Eastern Panhandle comes down from Baltimore, and Maryland officials are well aware.
Lieutenant Michael Fluharty is commander of the Maryland State Police unit in Hagerstown. He and his fellow officers cover about thirteen miles along interstate 81, which he claims is one of the worst areas for heroin trafficking.
“Every trooper in, on the road in Maryland right now carries the Narcan that everybody’s speaking of. Just last night, we had an administration by a trooper to save somebody’s life. Just last week, one of my troopers, pulls to what he thinks is a disabled vehicle on the road, comes to find a young lady who’s decided that she wants to overdose on what we believe heroin – some kind of opioid drug,” Fluharty explained.
Fluharty says what would prevent the most drug trafficking in the region is if the data collected by each of the four states’ troopers would be shared through a database.
“That’d be an excellent opportunity for us as a group, as a quad-state to share information, so if you’re getting the southbound traffic, I’m getting the northbound, and we can share this information it’s going to help us all. It’s a partnership between obviously legislators to support law enforcement, law enforcement to get the information, the statistics needed, so we can get the help and the tool we need.”
Republican Delegate Paul Espinosa of Jefferson County says having quad-state meetings every year are important to combat the drug problem and others faced in the Eastern Panhandle.
“A lot of the concerns that we have here in eastern West Virginia, very similar to some of our surrounding jurisdictions in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia,” Espinosa noted, “so it really provides an opportunity to not only discuss common concerns but also to hear about some of the approaches that our colleagues in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are taking to address those issues.”
Delegate John Overington, a Republican from Berkeley County, hosted this year’s Quad-State Legislative Conference, and he says working together with the other states should be a no-brainer.
“We have constituents that live in one area, that work in another area, and shop in a third state, so the area is sort of connected,” Overington said, “and I-81 is that connecting factor that is good in terms of jobs and economic development. It’s sort of a negative in terms of heroin distribution.”
The closeness of the states makes it easy for drug dealers to ship their drugs from one state to another, but Overington, and his fellow lawmakers from all four states, are hopeful they can work together to find a solution.
Federal regulators issued 199 citations during impact inspections of U.S. mines in November.The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration conducted the…
Federal regulators issued 199 citations during impact inspections of U.S. mines in November.
The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration conducted the inspections at 10 coal mines and six metal and nonmetal mines.
The agency said Monday in a news release that it ordered the shutdown of belt lines at Regent Allied Carbon Energy’s No. 2 mine in Wise County, Virginia, and issued 28 citations, along with seven orders. Federal inspectors found accumulations of combustible coal, coal dust and coal fines in violation of the mine’s ventilation plan.
The agency says the mine also lacked adequate fire and dust suppression.
The impact inspections began in 2010 after the Upper Big Branch mine explosion in West Virginia killed 29 miners.
A tractor-trailer fire filled an Interstate 77 tunnel with black smoke, backed up traffic for miles and sent two West Virginia firefighters to a hospital.
The Bluefield Daily Telegraph reports that the fire in the East River Mountain Tunnel near West Virginia’s border with Virginia was extinguished by 5:50 p.m. Friday, more than 2 1/2 hours after it was reported.
Mark Perkins, a firefighter with the Green Valley-Glenwood Volunteer Fire Department, said two of his colleagues were transported to Bluefield Regional Medical Center for treatment for smoke inhalation. Several other departments also responded.
Bluefield Fire Chief Jeff Warden said smoke pouring out of the tunnel was so thick that for about 50 feet from the entrance “you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.”
Here’s are some photos from reporters on the scene yesterday:
#BREAKING:Huge tunnel fire closes the WV Turnpike. Tractor trailer catches fire inside the East River Mountain Tunnel pic.twitter.com/dciuhLHVuv
