ORANGE COUNTY – The Carrboro Police Department is inviting you to come have “Coffee with a Cop!”
“Coffee with a Cop” is a chance for community members to connect with police officers, ask questions and learn more about the department. It’s part of a national initiative supported by the U.S. Department of Justice, to break down barriers between police departments and community members—“one cup of coffee at a time.”
“Coffee with a Cop” will take place on Friday, January 31, beginning at 8:00 a.m. at the Looking Glass Café on West Main Street. Everyone’s invited to attend.
St. Thomas More School is celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2014 with a year of festivities—beginning with a Golden Jubilee Celebration on Friday, January 31. Habitat for Humanity International CEO Jonathan Reckford—a St. Thomas More alum—will serve as guest speaker at the event, which begins at 7:00 p.m. at St. Thomas More Catholic Church, just off Fordham Boulevard at 940 Carmichael Street.
The Orange County Department on Aging is inviting you to help them celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Central Orange Senior Center, which opened five years ago on January 29, 2009.
The free event will take place on Friday, January 31, at 10:00 a.m. at the Central Orange Senior Center, located at 103 Meadowland Drive in Hillsborough. There will be food and music, plus a special performance by the Prime Time Players senior actors group.
The Orange County Public Library is hosting a free wellness workshop called “Make It Stick!” on Wednesday, January 29. Local wellness coach Marit Weikel will talk about how to change your habits to live healthier—and how to make those changes last.
The class will run from 6:30-7:30 p.m. at the main library in Hillsborough. Everyone is welcome.
The Friends of the Downtown is holding its monthly meeting on Thursday, January 30, at 9:00 a.m. on the second floor of the Franklin Hotel. It’s free and open to the public. Local architect Phil Szostak will be the featured speaker; he designed the DPAC in downtown Durham and he’s currently working on the Carrboro ArtsCenter.
The Orange County 4-H is inviting everyone to a Community Forum on Thursday, January 30. The forum is designed to identify the needs of local kids and teens, and 4-H officials will use data from the forum to develop programs for kids ranging from 5-19 years old.
The Community Forum will take place at 6:00 p.m. in the Orange County Center, located at 306 E. Revere Road in Hillsborough. Dinner will be served.
A study out of the UNC School of Medicine last week is contributing to a greater understanding of schizophrenia. UNC genetics and psychiatry professor Dr. Patrick Sullivan co-authored the study, which uncovered evidence that schizophrenia arises from the combined effects of certain minute mutations distributed across many genes.
The study was published in this week’s issue of Nature.
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation is providing the North Carolina Partnership for Children with a three-year, $3 million grant to expand a program called Shape NC.
Shape NC is an early childhood initiative designed to increase the number of children who start kindergarten at a healthy weight, by promoting physical activity and good eating practices. Shape NC is already being implemented in 19 child care centers across the state; the grant will enable the program to expand to another 240.
“I’ve been doing this since the very beginning,” Cohen says. “I came to Chapel Hill in 1980, and the first cases of HIV in Chapel Hill were in 1981. We had a fairly large epidemic of HIV in North Carolina that the health care providers and the University helped to manage.”
Cohen is UNC’s Associate Vice Chancellor for Global Health and director of the Center for Infectious Diseases.
The North Carolina Award is the state’s highest civilian award and was given to five other people along with Cohen. This came one day after Dean Smith was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest national civilian honor.
Cohen is an infectious disease specialist and says he works with a large group of people across the nation.
“Working to understand the transmission of the virus HIV, and, most importantly, developing strategies to prevent the transmission of HIV,” Cohen says.
Cohen says the study of HIV/AIDS has come a long way in his more than three decades of work on the disease.
“There’s no organism better studied than HIV, and there’s incredible discoveries along the way that have taken this once universally-fatal infection, and, now-a-days, this infection is detected early and (if) people receive the proper treatment, they live a normal, healthy lifespan,” Cohen says. “So it’s a quite remarkable journey over 33 years.”
Cohen received the award in the science division. He was joined this year by Asheville’s John E. Cram in fine arts, Davidson College graduate John M. H. Hart, Jr. in literature, and legislator Phillip J. Kirk Jr., education administrator John Harding Lucas, and internationally acclaimed linguist Walt Wolfram in public service.
CHAPEL HILL – Lungs have the ability to live longer than other organs after a person dies. If the lungs are recovered from an organ donor in time, it may lead to transplant operations that could save thousands of lives.
With a $4.2 million National Institutes of Health grant, the UNC School of Medicine is breaking ground with a clinical trial that tests an innovative method of recovering healthy lungs from donors who suffer sudden death outside a hospital.
Dr. Thomas Egan, professor of cardiothoracic surgery at the UNC of Medicine, is leading the trial. Through research, he found the lungs’ unique ability to stay alive.
“The reason the lung lives for hours after people die is because the lung has a supply of oxygen in all of the tiny little air sacs in the airwaves,” Egan says. “The cell in those airwaves and air sacs live off oxygen in the lungs, and they don’t rely on blood flow in order to get oxygen.”
Other organs require oxygen to be present through blood circulation.
Only 1,800 lungs a year are transplanted from conventional, brain dead organ donors who have died in a hospital. And many of that number, only 25 percent are found to be suitable for transplant.
“There maybe upwards of 40,000 patients that might be candidates for lung transplants to help them breathe better and live longer in frankly a much more improved quality of life if there were enough lungs to transplant.”
Egan says there is a great need for healthy lungs.
“Lung disease is now the third-leading cause of deaths in the United States,” he says. “While it is far behind cancer and cardiovascular disease, there are close to 200,000 deaths every year from in-stage lung disease.”
The trial has two crucial parts. The first step is retrieving the lungs, departing from the normal donation process.
Currently, the organs of registered donors who die outside of hospitals are not used. This is where Egan says the difference can be made.
There is a one to two hour window for the lungs to be recovered after the donor has died.
If emergency workers determine that the patient cannot be resuscitated, the local organ recovery agency will step in to contact the next-of-kin for permission to participate in the clinical trial.
Once permission is granted, emergency workers will then pump a small amount of air into the lungs to preserve them during the transport to a hospital.
Part two of the trial begins once the lungs arrive at the hospital.
Inside a dome-shaped machine, Egan’s lab perfuses and ventilates the lungs with a special solution to determine suitability for transplantation. The liquid is met to flow like blood would inside the lungs.
When the lungs are found to be healthy, the organs will be transplanted to patients who have consented under FDA- and IRB-approved standards and practices.
The trial pools together the cooperation of organizations such as the emergency rooms of UNC and Duke Hospitals; Wake County EMS; and Carolina Donor Services, the regional organ procurement organization.
If the trial proves successful, Egan believes it could lead to revolutionizing the organ donation process in the United States.
“Other organs might be salvaged down the road if we can change the whole paradigm of what happens to individuals after death if they have indicated a desire to be an organ donor.”
CHAPEL HILL – UNC Provost Jim Dean says University leaders are in the process of putting the final touches on this year’s budget.
“We’re on a fiscal year budget of July through June, but we can’t really do our budgeting until the legislature does their budgeting, and then the General Administration does their budget,” Dean says. “We’re downstream from that, so we’re getting close to the end of the budgeting.”
At its Aug. 9 meeting, the UNC System’s Board of Governors made it’s allocations for the 16 campuses, based on the North Carolina General Assembly’s two-year budget plan.
The legislature’s spending plan, which was approved in July, called for substantial cuts to the UNC System. The spending plan designated $115 million in permanent funding reductions to the System’s base operating budget.
State budget cuts also called for the elimination of all funding for the UNC School of Medicine. Five years ago, appropriations for the School of Medicine were about $46 million.
“We did better than we might have done but not quite so well as we would have hoped in certain areas,” Dean says. “We did end up with some budget cuts again. They are not so bad as we feared at one point.”
During four consecutive years of state budget cuts since the economic downturn, UNC campuses including Chapel Hill have faced significant reductions in state funding. Carolina has taken approximately $235 million in total state cuts since 2008, according to UNC’s website.