The algae, which is known formally as the single-cell Karenia brevis, has concentrated near Tampa and neighboring communities.
Scientists have found the algae at rates ranging from 10,000 cells per liter to more than 1 million cells per liter – levels that result in fish kills and breathing difficulties in exposed humans, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
The agency said red tide becomes harmful to people at 10,000 cells per liter.
Red tides produce a toxin called brevetoxin that can make humans ill if they breathe the toxin in through sea spray or get wet with contaminated water.
The illness can cause a range of symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including:
Coughing and sneezing
Shortness of breath
Eye, skin, and throat irritation
Asthma attacks
The FWC it had received multiple reports of dead fish respiratory irritation at communities through the Southwest Florida. One community, Indian Rocks Beach, decided to cancel a beach festival slated for next month amid red tide concerns.
Red tides are a naturally occurring phenomenon that have been observed in the Gulf of Mexico since the 1800s. Nascent studies have connected nutrient-laden runoff from farms and developments to increased levels of red tide along the coast.They begin to form on the coast beginning in the fall, and typically clear up by Spring.
Josh Hawley thinks you’re too stupid to realize Tucker Carlson is lying to you | Opinion
The Kansas City Star Editorial Board – March 8, 2023
Facebook/HawleyMO
Fox News lies to its viewers. Josh Hawley is fine with that.
Old news? Maybe. Certainly, we’ve known of both Fox’s mendacity and the Missouri Republican senator’s cynicism for a long time. But fresh developments have revealed yet again how deep the rot goes.
Monday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered a ludicrous alternative take on the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — that deadly attack on American democracy in the name of defying the will of the voters in order to keep Donald Trump in the White House. Using a feeble smattering of clips eked out of 40,000 hours of unseen Capitol surveillance video furnished to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson made a ridiculously weak case that it wasn’t actually a rebellion against the lawful and constitutional transfer of power to Joe Biden — instead, it was simply “mostly peaceful chaos,” generated by sightseers and tourists.
“The footage does not show an insurrection or a riot in progress,” Carlson said. It was a bald-faced attempt to rewrite history, to tell Americans that what they witnessed on Jan. 6 wasn’t real. “Gaslighting” is an overused term, but it describes Carlson’s efforts perfectly.
The good news is that many Republicans who typically defer to Fox News pushed back on Carlson’s falsehoods. Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina used a barnyard epithet to describe the absurdity. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell aligned himself with a letter from the Capitol Police chief, who accused Carlson of “cherry-picking” his video clips to show calmer moments amid the insurrectionist storm.
These leaders showed it’s more than possible to be a member of the GOP and still respect the truth of what happened on Jan. 6.
Unless you’re Josh Hawley. He embraced Carlson’s version of the insurrection. “Sunshine is always the right answer,” he tweeted Tuesday, openly and directly mocking McConnell’s rightful denunciation of the Fox idiocy.
Please. It’s not “sunshine” to furnish government videos only to one favored propagandist, as McCarthy did to Carlson. Real transparency would’ve meant making the footage widely available to all the news outlets that asked for it.
But it’s no surprise McCarthy gave the videos to Fox. Over the last few weeks, filings in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit against the network have revealed that Fox hosts were happy to air Trump’s false and discredited claims even though senior figures — all the way up to owner Rupert Murdoch and prime-time host Sean Hannity — knew at the time they were patently false. Instead, Hannity and Carlson actively undermined Fox’s few real journalists, even calling for the firing of one reporter who debunked Trump’s lies.
Why? Because they were afraid of losing conservative viewers to even further-right-wing alternatives such as Newsmax. “Weak ratings make good journalists do bad things,” Fox News exec Bill Sammon wrote in a December 2020 email. He might believe that. We don’t.
Fox host on Trump: ‘I hate him passionately’
Believing one thing and telling viewers another is a regular practice at Fox, clearly. Carlson is a fierce defender of Trump when he’s on the air. Behind the scenes? “I hate him passionately,” Carlson said of Trump, in a text revealed by the Dominion lawsuit. “What he’s good at is destroying things.” His viewers never heard that view.
That is the guy McCarthy put in charge of shedding “sunshine” on Jan. 6.
We don’t know Hawley’s real feelings about Trump. But we suspect that — like those up and down the ranks at Fox News — the senator knew better than to believe the former president’s lies, yet still embraced them out of expediency and fear. That’s likely why he led the ludicrous and doomed Senate effort to deny Biden’s rightful election.
Fox executives worried about losing viewers. Hawley had donors and voters to think about.
Now? There’s the matter of his reputation. Carlson on Monday said the famous video showing Hawley fleeing from the insurrectionists was “edited deceptively” by the Jan. 6 committee because, in fact, several other senators were also running away. We’re not sure how that makes Hawley look better, but the senator must take comfort in having an embarrassing moment ever-so-slightly whitewashed.
The problem is that Carlson’s insurrection denialism won’t wash. More than two dozen of Hawley’s Missouri constituents — including, most recently, a member of the Missouri National Guard — have been arrested or charged for their participation in the insurrection. Across the border, another nine Kansans have also been accused of involvement.
Anybody who cares to know what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, understands it was the bloody, violent and irredeemable affair we all saw unfolding in real time with our own eyes.
The folks at Fox News know it, no matter what Tucker Carlson says on his show. And Josh Hawley knows it too.
What will Miami look like with more sea rise? This high-tech car helps us picture it
Alex Harris – March 8, 2023
Hurricane Ian’s destructive storm surge last fall shocked many Floridians, even some who’d weathered severe hurricanes before. In some places, the waters were so high that survivors had to scramble to the second story or their roof for safety.
Experts say it’s tough for people to visualize what those record-breaking levels of surge would look like until they arrive.
But FloodVision, a new tool from nonprofit climate advocacy group Climate Central, could change that, with help from a high-tech car they’ve nicknamed the “flood rover.”
The vehicle isn’t anything special (it’s actually a rental), but the cameras and sensors strapped onto it are. They form a mobile scanning system that acts a lot like a souped-up Google Maps car, except the finished product is a simulation of a future flooded street.
Benjamin Strauss, CEO and chief scientist of Climate Central, calls it a “visual, visceral, powerful” way to explain the risks of hurricanes — and rising seas — to communities most at risk.
“We know the images are more powerful than any map we can make, or any graphic we can show you,” he said.
Strauss’ team has already done some scanning in Miami, Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Tampa, and they debuted the car and the new system at the Aspen Ideas: Climate conference in Miami Beach this week.
This is a simulation of what a Miami street could look like in 2070 with no interventions to slow down sea level rise. It was produced with FloodVision, a new technology from Climate Central.
In one example in Miami, researchers at Climate Central captured a picture of a neighborhood with the car cameras, then superimposed the two or so feet of sea rise the region is projected to see by 2070 under NOAA’s intermediate high standard.
The result: enough water to come halfway up a tree and soak through the doors of parked cars. It’s a familiar sight to residents of flood-prone neighborhoods like Brickell, which can reach the same levels of flooding after an intense rainstorm.
Strauss plans to use the technology to simulate images of what sea rise or intense storm surge could look like to educate communities about the risks they face from climate change. One potential hurdle is that the technology does not account for protections that local governments may have already installed, like elevated roads or higher sea walls and stronger stormwater pumps.
Without that, the picture of what could likely happen is skewed in places like Miami Beach, which has spent millions installing new protections against rising seas. But despite the growing body of scientific evidence showing the need for coastal cities to adapt to sea level rise, the execution of these projects has been controversial in the places that need them most.
Strauss hopes that his team’s work can be used to help cut through the noise and visually show residents the benefit of investing in flood protection.
“It’s expensive to build flood protections, and it’s also disruptive,” he said. “This technology can be used, essentially, to show what you’re preventing.”
California Readers Share Photos of Their Winter Wonderland
By Soumya Karlamangla – March 8, 2023
The Owens River Gorge in eastern California. Credit…Stephen Cunha
So much snow has transformed the landscape across the state.
Winter weather in the Golden State, of all places, continues to draw national attention this year.
First, atmospheric rivers flooded towns and swallowed cars. Then, snow fell in Silicon Valley, Santa Cruz, Oakland and a whole host of places unaccustomed to it. Graupel, an ice-snow combo, dusted the Hollywood sign. Yosemite National Park closed indefinitely after record snowfall buried cabins and blanketed roads.
And starting Thursday, another set of heavy storms is expected to hit much of the state, which could bring more flooding and rain damage. I don’t need to tell you — it’s been a wild winter.
Late last month I was driving in Paso Robles, a city on the Central Coast known for its wineries and olive groves, when I noticed the tops of the gently sloping green hills sprinkled with snow. I’d never seen anything like it.
The small town of Shandon in San Luis Obispo County last month. Credit…Soumya Karlamangla/The New York Times
Twenty miles east in Shandon, a small community also in San Luis Obispo County, the skies were mostly blue — but the roofs of cars, small homes and wooden barns were all blanketed in snow. I watched as a father and daughter, bundled in scarves and jackets, assembled a wobbly snowman from what had fallen on a grassy field in the city’s park.
Today we’re sharing photos you emailed us of what this winter has looked like in your neck of the woods. Leslie Bates, a reader who lives in Gualala on the Mendocino Coast, said that she had been sending snow pictures to her brother who lives in the Catskills in New York: “The world turned upside down!”
Craig Whichard’s cabin in Arnold. Credit…Craig Whichard
Sandra Sincek, who lives in Julian, a small mountain town northeast of San Diego, described her child’s first sled run of the year.
“Occasionally we will get a few inches of snow, but this was a glorious winter event,” she wrote. “When the clouds finally parted, our son carried his wooden snow sled to the top of the hill, carefully positioned it, climbed in, and let go.”
Craig Whichard wrote to us from his cabin in Arnold, on the western side of the Sierra Nevada and about 70 miles east of Stockton. He said that the five feet of snow that fell late last month was more than he’d seen in his 14 years there.
More on California
Struggling to Recover: Weeks after a brutal set of atmospheric rivers unleashed a disaster, the residents of Planada in Merced County are only beginning to rebuild.
Exploring Los Angeles: Walking down Rosecrans Avenue is not necessarily a pleasure. But it does offer a 27-mile canvas of the city’s vastness and its diverse communities coexisting.
A Bridge Goes Dark: A light installation across part of San Francisco’s Bay Bridge, had to be turned off because of the region’s harsh weather. They hope to raise $11 million to refurbish it.
In Cloverdale in Sonoma County. Credit…Star CarpenterA geodesic dome in the Santa Cruz mountains. Credit…Karrie GaylordThe view from Hollister in San Benito County. Credit…Susan HeckSnow-capped San Gabriel Mountains, seen from Glassell Park in Los Angeles. Credit…Emily Zuzik HolmesSnow-covered mountains behind the Hollywood sign. Credit…Patrick T. Fallon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Studying Ukraine war, China’s military minds fret over US missiles, Starlink
Eduardo Baptista and Greg Torode – March 7, 2023
Video: How U.S. support of Ukraine affects a potential defense of Taiwan Yahoo Finance’s Rick Newman.
BEIJING/HONG KONG (Reuters) -China needs the capability to shoot down low-earth-orbit Starlink satellites and defend tanks and helicopters against shoulder-fired Javelin missiles, according to Chinese military researchers who are studying Russia’s struggles in Ukraine in planning for possible conflict with U.S.-led forces in Asia.
A Reuters review of almost 100 articles in more than 20 defence journals reveals an effort across China’s military-industrial complex to scrutinise the impact of U.S. weapons and technology that could be deployed against Chinese forces in a war over Taiwan.
The Chinese-language journals, which also examine Ukrainian sabotage operations, reflect the work of hundreds of researchers across a network of People’s Liberation Army (PLA)-linked universities, state-owned weapons manufacturers and military intelligence think-tanks.
While Chinese officials have avoided any openly critical comments about Moscow’s actions or battlefield performance as they call for peace and dialogue, the publicly available journal articles are more candid in their assessments of Russian shortcomings.
China’s defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment about the researchers’ findings. Reuters could not determine how closely the conclusions reflect the thinking among China’s military leaders.
Two military attaches and another diplomat familiar with China’s defence studies said the Communist Party’s Central Military Commission, headed by President Xi Jinping, ultimately sets and directs research needs, and that it was clear from the volume of material that Ukraine was an opportunity the military leadership wanted to seize. The three people and other diplomats spoke to Reuters on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss their work publicly.
A U.S. defence official told Reuters that despite differences with the situation in Taiwan, the Ukraine war offered insights for China.
“A key lesson the world should take away from the rapid international response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that aggression will increasingly be met with unity of action,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the topic’s sensitivity, without addressing concerns raised in the Chinese research about specific U.S. capabilities.
STARLINK GAZING
Half a dozen papers by PLA researchers highlight Chinese concern at the role of Starlink, a satellite network developed by Elon Musk’s U.S.-based space exploration company SpaceX, in securing the communications of Ukraine’s military amid Russian missile attacks on the country’s power grid.
“The excellent performance of ‘Starlink’ satellites in this Russian-Ukrainian conflict will certainly prompt the U.S. and Western countries to use ‘Starlink’ extensively” in possible hostilities in Asia, said a September article co-written by researchers at the Army Engineering University of the PLA.
The authors deemed it “urgent” for China – which aims to develop its own similar satellite network – to find ways to shoot down or disable Starlink. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
The conflict has also forged an apparent consensus among Chinese researchers that drone warfare merits greater investment. China has been testing drones in the skies around Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy that Beijing has vowed to bring under its control.
“These unmanned aerial vehicles will serve as the ‘door kicker’ of future wars,” noted one article in a tank warfare journal published by state-owned arms manufacturer NORINCO, a supplier to the PLA, that described drones’ ability to neutralise enemy defences.
While some of the journals are operated by provincial research institutes, others are official publications for central government bodies such as the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, which oversees weapons production and military upgrades.
An article in the administration’s official journal in October noted that China should improve its ability to defend military equipment in view of the “serious damage to Russian tanks, armored vehicles and warships” inflicted by Stinger and Javelin missiles operated by Ukrainian fighters.
Collin Koh, a security fellow at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, said the Ukrainian conflict had provided impetus to long-standing efforts by China’s military scientists to develop cyber-warfare models and find ways of better protecting armour from modern Western weapons.
“Starlink is really something new for them to worry about; the military application of advanced civilian technology that they can’t easily replicate,” Koh said.
Beyond technology, Koh said he was not surprised that Ukrainian special forces operations inside Russia were being studied by China, which, like Russia, moves troops and weapons by rail, making them vulnerable to sabotage.
Despite its rapid modernisation, the PLA lacks recent combat experience. China’s invasion of Vietnam in 1979 was its last major battle – a conflict that rumbled on until the late 1980s.
Reuters’ review of the Chinese journals comes amid Western concern that China may be planning to supply Russia with lethal aid for its assault on Ukraine, which Beijing denies.
TAIWAN, AND BEYOND
Some of the Chinese articles stress Ukraine’s relevance given the risk of a regional conflict pitting China against the United States and its allies, possibly over Taiwan. The U.S. has a policy of “strategic ambiguity” over whether it would intervene militarily to defend the island, but is bound by law to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself.
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns has said that Xi has ordered his military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, while noting that the Chinese leader was probably unsettled by Russia’s experience in Ukraine.
One article, published in October by two researchers at the PLA’s National Defence University, analysed the effect of U.S. deliveries of high-mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS) to Ukraine, and whether China’s military should be concerned.
“If HIMARS dares to intervene in Taiwan in the future, what was once known as an ‘explosion-causing tool’ will suffer another fate in front of different opponents,” it concluded.
The article highlighted China’s own advanced rocket system, supported by reconnaissance drones, and noted that Ukraine’s success with HIMARS had relied on U.S. sharing of target information and intelligence via Starlink.
Four diplomats, including the two military attaches, said PLA analysts have long worried about superior U.S. military might, but Ukraine has sharpened their focus by providing a window on a large power’s failure to overwhelm a smaller one backed by the West.
While that scenario has obvious Taiwan comparisons, there are differences, particularly given the island’s vulnerability to a Chinese blockade that could force any intervening militaries into a confrontation.
Western countries, by contrast, are able to supply Ukraine by land via its European neighbours.
References to Taiwan are relatively few in the journals reviewed by Reuters, but diplomats and foreign scholars tracking the research say that Chinese defence analysts are tasked to provide separate internal reports for senior political and military leaders. Reuters was unable to access those internal reports.
Taiwanese Defence Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng said in February that China’s military is learning from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that any attack on Taiwan would have to be swift to succeed. Taiwan is also studying the conflict to update its own battle strategies.
Several articles analyse the strengths of the Ukrainian resistance, including special forces’ sabotage operations inside Russia, the use of the Telegram app to harness civilian intelligence, and the defense of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol.
Russian successes are also noted, such as tactical strikes using the Iskander ballistic missile.
The journal Tactical Missile Technology, published by state-owned weapons manufacturer China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, produced a detailed analysis of the Iskander, but only released a truncated version to the public.
Many other articles focus on the mistakes of Russia’s invading army, with one in the tank warfare journal identifying outdated tactics and a lack of unified command, while another in an electronic warfare journal said Russian communications interference was insufficient to counter NATO’s provision of intelligence to the Ukrainians, leading to costly ambushes.
A piece published this year by researchers at the Engineering University of the People’s Armed Police assessed the insights China could glean from the blowing-up of the Kerch Bridge in Russian-occupied Crimea. The full analysis has not been released publicly, however.
Beyond the battlefield, the work has covered the information war, which the researchers conclude was won by Ukraine and its allies.
One February article by researchers at the PLA Information Engineering University calls on China to preemptively prepare for a global public opinion backlash similar to that experienced by Russia.
China should “promote the construction of cognitive confrontation platforms” and tighten control of social media to prevent Western information campaigns from influencing its people during a conflict, it said.
(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista in Beijing and Greg Torode in Hong Kong; additional reporting by Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart in Washington. Editing by David Crawshaw.)
Ukraine-Russia war: Russian officers mutiny after devastating tank battle
Arthur Scott-Geddes – March 7, 2023
Ukrainian servicemen fire a 2S5 Giatsint-S self-propelled howitzer towards Russian troops outside the frontline town of Bakhmut – Reuters
Senior Russian officers have reportedly refused to continue pressing the attack on Vugledar after suffering heavy losses in a failed assault on the eastern Ukrainian town.
Russia is believed to have lost around 130 tanks and armoured fighting vehicles in a recent disastrous attempt to take the town from Ukraine’s forces.
Ukrainian military officials told the Kyiv Post that the officers of the 155th Brigade, which is believed to have suffered 300 casualties per day during the three-week assault, were refusing orders to continue attacking.
“The leaders of the brigade and senior officers are refusing to proceed with a new senseless attack as demanded by their unskilled commanders – to storm well-defended Ukrainian positions with little protection or preparation,” the Ukrainian military said.
It comes as Russian forces continued their attempt to seize Bakhmut, the eastern salt-mining town at the center of some of the bloodiest fighting of the war.
07:33 AM
Mud hampers Ukraine’s Bakhmut resupply efforts
Muddy conditions around Bakhmut are likely hampering Ukraine’s efforts to resupply its troops, according to the Ministry of Defence.
In its daily intelligence briefing, the ministry said: “Muddy conditions are likely hampering Ukrainian resupply efforts as they increasingly resort to using unpaved tracks.”
Numerous reports have suggested that Ukrainian troops defending the eastern town are running seriously low on ammunition as they battle to hold back Russia’s advance.
“The Ukrainian defence of Bakhmut continues to degrade forces on both sides,” the ministry said. “Over the weekend, Ukrainian forces likely stabilised their defensive perimeter following previous Russian advances into the north of the town.
07:25 AM
China claims Ukraine crisis driven by ‘invisible hand’
The Ukraine crisis seems to be driven by an invisible hand pushing for the protraction and escalation of the conflict, China’s foreign minister Qin Gang has claimed.
The “invisible hand” is “using the Ukraine crisis to serve certain geopolitical agendas”, Mr Qin said on the sidelines of an annual parliament meeting in Beijing, calling for dialogue to begin as soon as possible.
The battle for Bakhmut is getting so close that ‘fistfights have been happening,’ Ukrainian soldier says
John Haltiwanger – March 7, 2023
Ukrainian soldiers on the outskirts of Bakhmut on January 14, 2023.Spencer Platt/Getty Images
A Ukrainian soldier told the Washington Post the fighting in Bakhmut is brutal and at close quarters.
The soldier said there have even been fistfights as they fight off waves of Russian mercenaries.
Bakhmut is widely expected to fall to Russian forces soon, but it will be a hollow victory.
Fighting in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, which has been one of the primary battles in the war for months, has featured brutal, close quarters combat, according to a Ukrainian soldier.
In some cases, Ukrainian troops have searched house-to-house for the enemy and been forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat, Dmytro Vatagin, a 48-year-old Ukrainian soldier, told the Washington Post.
“Fistfights have been happening,” Vatagin said. “Everyone has their own fighting story.”
The infamous Wagner mercenary group has played a central role in the fight for Bakhmut. Vatagin told the Post that Wagner has thrown its forces — a mix of seasoned fighters and newly released convicts — “like meat” at the frontline in relentless waves that have exhausted Ukrainian defenders. Wagner has recruited Russian prisoners for the fight and treated them like “cannon fodder,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said last month.
Similarly, UK officials have claimed that some Russian reservists in the attacks were told to fight with shovels.
The mercenary group has suffered roughly 30,000 casualties in the war, Kirby said.
Russia’s extreme costs in assaulting Bakhmut, a city of roughly 70,000 before the war, are seen by most Western analysts as out of step with the strategic value of the gained territory, from which they could advance down two highways should they still have combat power.
“It is more of a symbolic value than it is strategic and operational value,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said of Bakhmut in comments to reporters on Monday, per Reuters.
“The fall of Bakhmut won’t necessarily mean that the Russians have changed the tide of this fight,” Austin added.
The city is seemingly on the verge of falling to Russian forces, but Ukraine is not giving up without a fight and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Monday said that his top generals have called for reinforcing Bakhmut’s defense. That said, top military experts have suggested that it might be time for Ukraine to cut its losses in Bakhmut.
“The tenacious defense of Bakhmut achieved a great deal, expending Russian manpower and ammunition. But strategies can reach points of diminishing returns,” Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Center for Naval Analyses, said on Twitter.
“This fight doesn’t play to Ukraine’s advantages as a force,” Kofman said, warning that if Ukrainian forces continue to expend resources on Bakhmut “it could impede the success of a more important operation.”
Fighting chronic Lyme disease, healthcare policies in Indiana
Jayde Leary – March 6, 2023
Editor’s Note: The following is part of a class project originally initiated in the classroom of Ball State University professor Adam Kuban in fall 2021. Kuban continued the project this spring semester, challenging his students to find sustainability efforts in the Muncie area and pitch their ideas to Deanna Watson, editor of The Star Press, Journal & Courier and Pal-Item. Several such stories are being featured this spring.
MUNCIE, Ind. − Chronic Lyme disease patients in the state of Indiana and all over the United States have been struggling to find affordable treatment due to the disease itself not being covered by insurance past the 30-day treatment that is provided.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Lyme disease is transmitted to humans through being bit by infected blacklegged ticks. Patients who experience symptoms of pain, fatigue or difficulty thinking more than six months after they finish treatment have a condition called Post-Treatment Lyme Disease Syndrome, also known as chronic Lyme disease.
Most cases of Lyme disease can be treated successfully with a two-to-four-week course of antibiotics. According to an article by Medical Bill Gurus, insurance companies are not required to cover treatment per the Infectious Disease Society of America guidelines. Therefore, insurance companies do not recognize chronic Lyme disease and use these guidelines to deny coverage for long-term treatment.
A majority of all Lyme Literate Medical Doctors are not in-network with any major insurance companies, and this leaves those patients who still experience symptoms after the provided few weeks of antibiotics with slim options.
Lyme disease patients who continue to have symptoms after that four-week mark may not be able to get the treatment they need due to the lack of financial help. According to a 2022 study by Samantha S. Ficon published in “Nursing Continuing Professional Development”, the disease can be harmful and deadly if it is not treated effectively early on, and 10% to 20% of patients previously treated for Lyme disease still experience symptoms for more than six months after finishing antibiotic treatment.
Kimberly Sharp, director of pain management for Community Health Network, has worked in the field of chronic pain management for over 20 years.
“There is currently no evidence supporting the long-term use of antibiotics, and the CDC does not officially recognize chronic Lyme. There are limited dollars for care, so insurance companies must draw the line somewhere on what is covered,” Sharp said.
Many insurance companies are not covering what chronic Lyme patients need.
Riley Sims, senior art major, working on her schoolwork in the L.A. Pittenger Student Center at Ball State University. According to Tick Check, there were 2,013 cases of Lyme disease confirmed in the state of Indiana from 2000 to 2020.
Riley Sims, senior at Ball State University, was diagnosed with Lyme disease in May 2020 and struggles with the chronic illness daily. She said she has to work twice as hard to keep up with her schoolwork and day-to-day tasks, and she has no choice but to seek treatment. Sims looks to her mother and father for financial help in order to cover her chronic Lyme expenses. Due to being a busy college student, she does not have enough money at this point in time to cover the costs of treatment and appointments.
[Insert photo of Riley Sims in front of Beneficence]
“I take supplements for my chronic Lyme disease that are suggested by my doctor, and I also have to get many blood tests, but none of it is covered by insurance, not even my doctor appointments,” Sims said.
According to Global Lyme Alliance, patients can suffer for years not only from the symptoms of chronic Lyme, but from the financial impact as well. Patients end up paying out-of-pocket costs and hope for reimbursement. This leaves patients who become too sick to work with large financial struggles.
Mitchell Goldman, MD, senior associate dean for Graduate Medical Education and professor of medicine for the Department of Medicine/Infectious Diseases at the University of Missouri School of Medicine, previously worked at the Indiana University Medical Center and has experience with Lyme disease patients.
“Insurance companies often require an approval process to provide therapies beyond usual guidelines, and this requires a physician or other provider to plead the case to the insurance company that may accept or deny a therapy beyond usual time,” Goldman said.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 34,945 reported cases of Lyme disease in the United States in 2019. Compared to other tickborne illnesses, this number is high. There were 5,655 Anaplasmosis cases, 5,207 Spotted Fever Rickettsiosis cases, 2,420 Babesiosis cases and 2,093 cases of Ehrlichia chaffeensis ehrlichiosis. Many patients suffer daily from chronic Lyme disease with no help from their insurance providers, and some of them may even be forced to quit treatment due to financial challenges.
[Insert picture of Riley Sims working on schoolwork]
Sims said the Lyme Treatment Foundation has helped her tremendously and that other patients seeking financial help should look more into other non-profit organizations like this.
“Lyme disease is like a rollercoaster. I just wish we had more help riding it,” Sims said.
‘I just found myself struggling to keep up’: Number of teachers quitting hits new high
Matt Barnum – March 6, 2023
Why some US school districts are seeing extreme teacher shortages
The data is in: More teachers than usual exited the classroom after last school year, confirming longstanding fears that pandemic-era stresses would prompt an outflow of educators. That’s according to a Chalkbeat analysis of data from eight states – the most comprehensive accounting of recent teacher turnover to date.
In Washington state, more teachers left the classroom after last school year than at any point in the last three decades. Maryland and Louisiana saw more teachers depart than any time in the last decade. And North Carolina saw a particularly alarming trend of more teachers leaving mid-school year.
The turnover increases were not massive. But they were meaningful, and the churn could affect schools’ ability to help students make up for learning loss in the wake of the pandemic. This data also suggests that spiking stress levels, student behavior challenges, and a harsh political spotlight have all taken their toll on many American teachers.
“Education had changed so dramatically since COVID. The issues were getting bigger and bigger,” said Rebecca Rojano, who last year left a job teaching high school Spanish in Connecticut. “I just found myself struggling to keep up.”
Across 8 states, more teachers left the classroom following last school year
Since the pandemic threw U.S. schools into disarray, many educators and experts warned that more teachers would flee the profession. But in 2020, turnover dipped in many places as the economy stalled, then in 2021 it ticked back up to normal or slightly above-average levels.
As this school year began, widespread reports of teacher shortages suggested that turnover had jumped more significantly.
Data was hard to come by, though. The federal government doesn’t regularly track teacher quit rates. Many states don’t either, with education officials in California, New Mexico, Ohio and Pennsylvania saying that they don’t know how many teachers leave each year.
But Chalkbeat was able to obtain the latest teacher turnover numbers from eight states: Hawaii, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Washington. These figures encompassed turnover between the 2021-22 year and this school year.
In all cases, turnover was at its highest point in at least five years – typically around 2 percentage points greater than before the pandemic. That implies that in a school with 50 teachers, one more than usual left after last school year.
“I am struck by just how consistent these patterns are looking at all of these different states,” said Melissa Diliberti, a researcher at RAND, which has monitored teacher attrition during the pandemic.
In Louisiana, for instance, nearly 7,000 teachers exited the classroom last school year, or about 1,000 more than usual. That’s a turnover rate of 14%, up from between 11% and 12% in a typical pre-pandemic year.
There was variation among the eight states. Mississippi’s teacher workforce was the most stable: Turnover was 13% this year, only slightly higher than the two years before the pandemic. North Carolina saw the largest spike: 16% of teachers left after last year, compared with less than 12% in the three years before the pandemic.
For Kimberly Biondi, who taught high school English for 21 years in a district outside Charlotte, her reasons for leaving were wrapped up in the politics of education. She advocated for remote instruction as well as in-school safety rules, such as masking, but faced personal criticism from a local group opposed to these measures, she said. Biondi was also worried that politics could eventually limit what she taught.
“I taught AP language where we were supposed to teach very controversial work. I taught Malcolm X. I taught all sorts of philosophers and speakers,” she said. “I could only imagine how I would be targeted for continuing to teach this.”
Other former teachers cited growing workloads and more difficulty managing student behavior.
Rojano said that student engagement plummeted as students returned to class in fall 2021, some for the first time in over a year. “A lot of these students are really hurting and suffering with intense emotional problems and high needs,” she said. “The needs just grew after the pandemic – I noticed a lot more emotional outbursts.”
It didn’t help, she said, that her class sizes were large, ranging from 25 to 30 students, making it hard to form close relationships with students. Plus, the school was short staffed and had many absences, forcing Rojano to constantly cover other teachers’ classes, losing her planning time.
She left in the middle of the last school year, something she never imagined doing because it was so disruptive for the school and her students. “It got so bad,” she said. “I was very overwhelmed and stressed. I was anxious and tired all the time.” Rojano ended up taking a job at an insurance company, where she is able to work remotely when she wants.
State reports hint that rising frustration has pushed more teachers out of the classroom. In Louisiana, the number of teachers who resigned due to dissatisfaction increased. In Hawaii, more teachers than usual identified their work environment as the reason for leaving. (In both states, personal reasons or retirement were still far more common explanations.)
A degree of staff turnover in schools is considered healthy. Some new teachers realize the profession just isn’t for them. Others take different jobs in public education, becoming, say, an assistant principal. But in general, research has found that teacher churn harms student learning – students lose relationships with trusted educators, inexperienced teachers are brought on as replacements, and in some cases classrooms are left with only long-term substitutes.
While the eight states where Chalkbeat obtained data may not be representative of the country as a whole, there are signs that higher attrition was widespread. In a recent nationally representative survey from RAND, school district leaders reported a 4 percentage point increase in teacher turnover. Data from a handful of districts show a similar trend. For instance, turnover among licensed staff, including teachers, spiked from 9% to 12% in Clark County, Nevada, the country’s fifth-largest district. In Austin, Texas, turnover jumped from 17% to 24%.
Other school staff appear to be leaving at higher rates, too.
Hawaii experienced a jump in aides and service staff who exited public schools. North Carolina saw over 17% of principals depart last school year, compared to an average of 13% in the three years before the pandemic. The RAND survey also found a sharp increase in principals leaving.
A degree of staff turnover in schools is considered healthy. Some new teachers realize the profession just isn’t for them. Others take different jobs in public education, becoming, say, an assistant principal. But in general, research has found that teacher churn harms student learning – students lose relationships with trusted educators, inexperienced teachers are brought on as replacements, and in some cases classrooms are left with only long-term substitutes.
“Teacher attrition can be destabilizing for schools,” said Kevin Bastian, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, where he calculated the state’s turnover rate.
He found that effective teachers were particularly likely to leave the state’s public schools last year. Mid-year turnover, which is especially disruptive, increased from under 4% in prior years to over 6% in the 2021-22 school year in North Carolina. The state also ended up hiring fewer teachers for this school year than it lost, suggesting that some positions were eliminated or left vacant.
Biondi is now seeing the effects on her own children, who attend school in the district where she taught. “My daughter lost her math teacher in December,” she said. “They don’t have a replacement teacher – she’s struggling very much in math.”
This year, schools may have been in a particularly fraught position. Teachers appear to be leaving at higher rates, and there’s been a longer-standing decline in people training to become teachers. At the same time, schools may have wanted to hire more teachers than usual because they remain flush with COVID relief money and want to address learning loss. That’s a recipe for a shortage.
Typically, shortages hit high-poverty schools the hardest. They also tend to be more severe in certain areas including special education, math, and science.
Benjamin Mosley, principal of Glenmount Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore, has been buffeted by these pressures. He’s had multiple teachers leave in the middle of this year, and has not been able to replace them or some others who left at the end of last year.
On a recent visit to the school, students in a math class listened to a teacher based in Florida teach a lesson virtually; the class was supervised by an intervention teacher who was originally meant to provide small group tutoring. A social studies class, whose teacher had recently resigned, was being overseen by a staff member who had been hired to serve as a student mentor.
Mosley is still actively trying to find teachers and is now considering candidates whom he might have passed over in years past.
“We can put a man on the moon, but yet we can’t find teachers,” he said.
Matt Barnum is a Spencer fellow in education journalism at Columbia University and a national reporter at Chalkbeat covering education policy, politics, and research.
Thousands of pro-Trump bots are attacking DeSantis, Haley
Avid Klepper – March 6, 2023
WASHINGTON (AP) — Over the past 11 months, someone created thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts — perhaps hundreds of thousands of them — to offer a stream of praise for Donald Trump.
Besides posting adoring words about the former president, the fake accounts ridiculed Trump’s critics from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador who is challenging her onetime boss for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
When it came to Ron DeSantis, the bots aggressively suggested that the Florida governor couldn’t beat Trump, but would be a great running mate.
As Republican voters size up their candidates for 2024, whoever created the bot network is seeking to put a thumb on the scale, using online manipulation techniques pioneered by the Kremlin to sway the digital platform conversation about candidates while exploiting Twitter’s algorithms to maximize their reach.
The sprawling bot network was uncovered by researchers at Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm that shared its findings with The Associated Press. While the identity of those behind the network of fake accounts is unknown, Cyabra’s analysts determined that it was likely created within the U.S.
To identify a bot, researchers will look for patterns in an account’s profile, its follower list and the content it posts. Human users typically post about a variety of subjects, with a mix of original and reposted material, but bots often post repetitive content about the same topics.
That was true of many of the bots identified by Cyabra.
“One account will say, ‘Biden is trying to take our guns; Trump was the best,’ and another will say, ‘Jan. 6 was a lie and Trump was innocent,'” said Jules Gross, the Cyabra engineer who first discovered the network. “Those voices are not people. For the sake of democracy I want people to know this is happening.”
Bots, as they are commonly called, are fake, automated accounts that became notoriously well-known after Russia employed them in an effort to meddle in the 2016 election. While big tech companies have improved their detection of fake accounts, the network identified by Cyabra shows they remain a potent force in shaping online political discussion.
The new pro-Trump network is actually three different networks of Twitter accounts, all created in huge batches in April, October and November 2022. In all, researchers believe hundreds of thousands of accounts could be involved.
The accounts all feature personal photos of the alleged account holder as well as a name. Some of the accounts posted their own content, often in reply to real users, while others reposted content from real users, helping to amplify it further.
“McConnell… Traitor!” wrote one of the accounts, in response to an article in a conservative publication about GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, one of several Republican critics of Trump targeted by the network.
One way of gauging the impact of bots is to measure the percentage of posts about any given topic generated by accounts that appear to be fake. The percentage for typical online debates is often in the low single digits. Twitter itself has said that less than 5% of its active daily users are fake or spam accounts.
When Cyabra researchers examined negative posts about specific Trump critics, however, they found far higher levels of inauthenticity. Nearly three-fourths of the negative posts about Haley, for example, were traced back to fake accounts.
The network also helped popularize a call for DeSantis to join Trump as his vice presidential running mate — an outcome that would serve Trump well and allow him to avoid a potentially bitter matchup if DeSantis enters the race.
The same network of accounts shared overwhelmingly positive content about Trump and contributed to an overall false picture of his support online, researchers found.
“Our understanding of what is mainstream Republican sentiment for 2024 is being manipulated by the prevalence of bots online,” the Cyabra researchers concluded.
The triple network was discovered after Gross analyzed Tweets about different national political figures and noticed that many of the accounts posting the content were created on the same day. Most of the accounts remain active, though they have relatively modest numbers of followers.
A message left with a spokesman for Trump’s campaign was not immediately returned.
Most bots aren’t designed to persuade people, but to amplify certain content so more people see it, according to Samuel Woolley, a professor and misinformation researcher at the University of Texas whose most recent book focuses on automated propaganda.
When a human user sees a hashtag or piece of content from a bot and reposts it, they’re doing the network’s job for it, and also sending a signal to Twitter’s algorithms to boost the spread of the content further.
Bots can also succeed in convincing people that a candidate or idea is more or less popular than the reality, he said. More pro-Trump bots can lead to people overstating his popularity overall, for example.
“Bots absolutely do impact the flow of information,” Woolley said. “They’re built to manufacture the illusion of popularity. Repetition is the core weapon of propaganda and bots are really good at repetition. They’re really good at getting information in front of people’s eyeballs.”
Until recently, most bots were easily identified thanks to their clumsy writing or account names that included nonsensical words or long strings of random numbers. As social media platforms got better at detecting these accounts, the bots became more sophisticated.
So-called cyborg accounts are one example: a bot that is periodically taken over by a human user who can post original content and respond to users in human-like ways, making them much harder to sniff out.
Bots could soon get much sneakier thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. New AI programs can create lifelike profile photos and posts that sound much more authentic. Bots that sound like a real person and deploy deepfake video technology may challenge platforms and users alike in new ways, according to Katie Harbath, a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former Facebook public policy director.
“The platforms have gotten so much better at combating bots since 2016,” Harbath said. “But the types that we’re starting to see now, with AI, they can create fake people. Fake videos.”
These technological advances likely ensure that bots have a long future in American politics — as digital foot soldiers in online campaigns, and as potential problems for both voters and candidates trying to defend themselves against anonymous online attacks.
“There’s never been more noise online,” said Tyler Brown, a political consultant and former digital director for the Republican National Committee. “How much of it is malicious or even unintentionally unfactual? It’s easy to imagine people being able to manipulate that.”
