After a sharp decline in vaccinations, state health officials urge residents to get back on track with preventative healthcare. Kevin Barnhart has the story.
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The LSU football team begins summer workouts tomorrow. Jeff Palermo has more on the national champs’ COVID-19 mitigation efforts…
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The Louisiana Department of Health is reminding the public to catch up on the routine vaccinations that went by the wayside due to coronavirus restrictions. State immunization director Dr. Frank Welch says medical facilities are opened again, it’s time to get back on track.
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State and federal data show a sharp drop in vaccine orders from January through April.
Welch says skipping vaccines can have disastrous consequences.
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For those that may be uneasy about entering a doctor’s office, Welch says most facilities have changed up the experience with spread mitigation efforts.
Cut 5 (12) “…and preventative healthcare.”
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As protesters nationwide demand changes in policing policy, Baton Rouge Mayor Sharon Weston Broome says the city’s police union has been an obstruction to reform within the department.
Broome told Talk Louisiana that the union’s problem is that it protects bad apples…
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The Baton Rouge Police Union defended Officer Blane Salamoni in the wake of the Alton Sterling shooting, and Broome has previously expressed frustration with their resistance to post-Sterling police reforms.
Broome says they need greater flexibility to identify and remove bad cops from the department, and the union makes that difficult to do.
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Broome says cops with traceable records of alarming behavior are often the ones victimizing their communities.
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The Minneapolis City Council announced veto-proof support for moving ahead with dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department in the wake of the death of George Floyd. Broome says they do not plan to pursue a similar policy.
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The 2020 dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is projected to be four times larger this year than what a task force established in 2001. LSU Marine Science Professor Nancy Rabalais estimates this year’s 77-hundred square mile dead zone is roughly the size of New Hampshire.
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The dead zone stretches along the bottom of the continental shelf along Texas and Louisiana.
Fertilizer from Midwest agriculture washes down the Mississippi River, exiting at the mouth forming an area of low oxygen and high nitrogen. Rabalais says the nitrogen loads have remained steady since 1980…
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Rabalais says despite recognizing the dead zone issue, the federal government has not been able to tackle the problem.
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This year is estimated to be the 7th largest dead zone since measurements began in 1985.
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The LSU football team will have to wait one more day before starting voluntary workouts. They were scheduled to begin today, but the campus is closed because of Tropical Storm Cristobal. Senior associate athletic trainer Shelly Mullenix says when players arrived on campus last week they were given an antibody test
Cut 12 (10) “and everything”
Mullenix says they are not testing players daily for coronavirus, but they are screening for the disease. She says there are temperature checks when they enter the football operations building and coaches and players will answer a CDC questionnaire about their health
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Mullenix says if any player tests positive for the coronavirus, a doctor will determine if that person needs to go to the hospital or self isolate in a dorm room…
Cut 14 (05) “…the spread”