Jason Sandford
Jason Sandford is a reporter, writer, blogger and photographer interested in all things Asheville.
WLOSers were all about the scary health news on Wednesday. Here’s a look:
Fescue foot
Sheraldo went out to a farm to tell us that some farmers are battling something called “fescue foot” in their cattle. The fungus or whatever it is comes from a toxin in fescue grass that gets stronger during drought conditions. The cows eat the toxic grass and it messes up their feet and hooves. The cows can die from it. The farmer told Sheraldo he’s giving his cows antibiotics and feeding them grain instead of fesce.
The deadly ‘superbug’
A drug resistant, flesh-eating staph infection is freaking some people out after a teen died in Virginia recently and three school districts shut down as a safety precaution. Russ Bowen told us that the super bug has been found right here in the mountains, with two cases at Roberson High School and one case in a Jackson County school.
The bug is nicknamed MRSA, short for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. How do you know if you’ve got it? Well, if you hang out in high school gyms, that can be bad. And if you share towels and razors with people. And if you have something that looks like a spider bite that’s real painful.
Sanitation is key to fighting it, Russ says.
Here comes the flu
Buncombe County has the distinction of having the first reported case of the flu in North Carolina, WLOSers said. A 43-year-old woman has been diagnosed with the flu bug, and the local health department is responding by offering flu shot clinics at the Asheville Mall on Thursday and Friday.
In crime news…
Bounty hunters are searching for a fugitive in Waynesville, and police want him two. They say he’s armed and dangerous… And former WNC Nature Center Director James Lance has pleaded guilty to making some $7,000 worth of unauthorized purchases on a Friends of the Nature Center credit card.
Amazing video not so amazing
WLOSers insisted that we just had to see some amazing video of a cop getting a woman out of a car before a train arrived to obliterate said car. But there was plenty of time to get the woman out, as the video clearly showed. Not so amazing, people. The great video was the video you showed of the KFC employee in Statesville fighting for a gun with an armed robber. Now that was wild.
In other news…
Presidential hopefuls John McCain and Mitt Romney will be in upstate South Carolina on Thursday. McCain will be in Greenville and Romney will be in Spartanburg. Speaking of running for president, Stephen Colbert says he’s gonna run for president – in South Carolina. And as a Repub and a Dem…. There was another community meeting at the Skyland Fire Department to talk about pollution from the former CTS plant on Mills Gap Road… And former U.S. Rep. Charles Taylor has closed out his old campaign account, but still has yet to say whether he’s running again for congress.
Dealing with the drought in Robbinsville
WLOSers said Robbinsville out in Graham County is taking some tough measures to deal with the drought. They’re not washing dishes at schools, and people can’t water lawns or wash cars. The schools have stopped hosing down cafeteria floors and are only mopping now, and the schools may ask children to bring bag lunches if things get worse. The school has also offered to open up to let students take showers in the morning if they’ve run out of water at home. The town says it’s getting three or four applications a day from people wanting to drill new wells.
Groundbreaking on a new animal shelter
Jeremy Butterfield covered the groundbreaking on a new $5 million animal shelter on Pond Road in west Ashvegas.
The old shelter on Lee’s Creek Road was built in the 1950s and is 7,000 square feet. The new facility will actually be two buildings – a shelter and an adoption center, totaling some 28,000 square feet. Jeremy got licked in the face doing the story, and WLOSers added that Deal Buick donated the land for the shelter.
Avery King’s family outraged
The mother and aunt of Avery King, the little girl who was run down and killed in a McDonald’s parking lot in Georgia, went on Good Morning America Wednesday to say that it wasn’t right that the convicted killer gets taxpayer-funded health care. Lanny Barnes has leukemia and is getting a bone marrow transplant.
It kills more people than AIDS… recently.
Nationally, AIDS isn’t the super-killer it was in the ’80s, but I would imagine it still kicks most diseases’ asses on a global scale.
Oh, and they mentioned the second school at 10 and 11.
Blue ridge something or other school.
The bug can be carried in the nose, but staph is contacted through almost any skin contact or sweat contact with an infected individual Jamunca.
I wrestled in High School, and I saw plenty of staph. That shit is crazy scary, and kills more people than AIDS, which you would know if you actually watched all of World News Tonight. So stop putting quotes around it. It Killed 18,000 people in America in 2005.
Also, She probably didn’t mention the kids health because staph can takes MONTHS to clear up and has a terrible rate of recurrence.
And how were they going to name the school when no one else knows. The paper didn’t know, no one knew. It’s called MEDICAL PRIVACY LAWS.
So who licked Jeremy in the face?
I noticed she didn’t name the other school too…
Maybe they’re saving it for sweeps?
"Could it be your child’s school? Tune in to MY40 to find out, cause we won’t tell you anywhere else and need the ratings."
Also, Sheraldo is another form of fungus.
=WL=
Wednesday night’s infotainment led off with a story about the MRSA "superbug" afflicting two area schools. Carolyn Ryan then talked for about 3-4 minutes about the Roberson JV team. She showed some good ambush video of a guy sitting in his car and holding a cell phone to his ear for half his clip. Hilarious.
But the bigger issue was that SHE NEVER MENTIONED THE OTHER SCHOOL!
So let me get this straight. There’s a killer bug on the loose and it’s in two schools, but you’re only going to name one? Wow. Just. Wow.
As for the bug, the Roberson "outbreak" took place TWO WEEKS AGO. And now that I think about it, I don’t remember Ryan saying the kid(s) are ok. I’m pretty sure I don’t remember hearing about any deaths, but still… you’d think this would be an important thing to note. Maybe I just missed it. I hope I only missed it.
So, we have a "killer superbug" that popped up at Roberson two weeks ago, and apparently afflicted another unnamed school.
And then, they showed the national news report sidebar (which I actually watched during the ABC World Report earlier), which implies that the MRSA bug is carried around in the nose. So, how does skin-to-skin contact factor into things? I figure the bug is spread by rubbing your nose and touching stuff. Not by rubbing up against folks, like the WLOS report implied.
The whole thing is just, well, I don’t even know what to call it. It’s just bad reporting.
…
In yet more bad reporting, there was a story during the 6:30 broadcast that talked about creating more soccer fields for Henderson County. The only other soccer fields were Jackson Park and Fletcher Park. Soccer is on the rise because of a growing Hispanic community. Soccer, soccer, soccer. Oh, and did I mention soccer?
So, what should be showing on the b-roll for the story? Flag football. Apparently, the cameraperson went out to a Henderson County park and just so happened to run across some people playing flag football. By golly, that’s perfect for a soccer story! They’re pretty much the same thing anyways, right?
Gah, we’ve got to have the absolute worst TV news I’ve ever seen. Ever.