The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

A bacterium that causes a disease called scrub typhus -- a disease not previously reported in the United States -- has been detected in North Carolina, according to a new study. A bacterium that causes a disease called scrub typhus -- a disease not previously reported in the United States -- has been detected in North Carolina, according to a new study by researchers at North Carolina State University and UNC-Greensboro. The researchers stress that scrub typhus, which can cause fever, headache and body aches -- and can be fatal if left untreated by antibiotics -- has not yet been detected in animals or people in the state. The NC State researchers detected the bacterium -- the genus is Orientia in the family Rickettsiaceae -- at a high frequency while testing free living, larval (ready to bite) trombiculid mites, commonly called chiggers, in several different recreational parks in North Carolina. "We wanted to see if chiggers in the United States carried Orientia," said Loganathan Ponnusamy, an NC State principal research scholar in entomology and co-corresponding author of a paper that describes the research. "We haven't in the past had the diagnostic tools to test for this specific bacterium at the genus level." "We set a black tile on the ground in 10 different North Carolina state parks and picked up chiggers as they crossed the tile. Microbiome studies allowed us to characterize all the bacteria in the chiggers. One park showed a 90% positivity rate for the bacterium (nine out of 10 chiggers captured); another showed an 80% positivity rate (eight of 10 chiggers captured). Other parks showed positivity rates of just 10%." Trombiculid mites are only parasitic in their larval stage. They search for vertebrate hosts -- including humans -- to bite, Ponnusamy says. "Chiggers can spread bacteria to people or rodents when they bite but can also pass bacteria to future generations of mites through their eggs," he added. The researchers say that scrub typhus presents symptoms similar to those of Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a disease generally ascribed to tick bites. Scrub typhus is found more commonly in Asia and the Pacific, but in recent years has been detected in Africa and the Middle East. It is uncertain whether spread is caused by people or goods carrying chiggers from one place to another. "We don't know if this is a recent introduction into the state or if the bacterium has been here for years," said R. Michael Roe, William Neal Reynolds Distinguished Professor of Entomology at NC State and co-author of the paper. "We also don't know if the infected chiggers found in North Carolina actually will cause disease; this has to be determined in future work." "We also don't have information about whether the chigger infection rate is decreasing or increasing," said Kaiying Chen, a postdoctoral research scholar at NC State and lead author of the paper. The NC State and UNC-Greensboro researchers are resampling chiggers in the recreational park sites to see if the reported findings remain consistent. The paper appears in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. Other co-authors include Nicholas V. Travanty and Charles S. Apperson from North Carolina State University; Reuben Garshong and Gideon Wasserberg from the University of North Carolina Greensboro; and Dac Crossley from the Georgia Museum of Natural History. Funding was provided by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (grant no. 1R03AI166406-01); a grant from the Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention, and from the Department of the Army, U.S. Army Contracting Command, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Natick Contracting Division, Ft Detrick MD. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government and no official endorsement should be inferred.

Senior Care Business Owner in Burlington and Chapel Hill Adds to Her Portfolio, Acquires Always Best Care of Greensboro and High Point ROSEVILLE, Calif., Oct. 19, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Always Best Care Senior Services, one of the leading senior care franchise systems in the United States, announced today that existing franchisee Samantha Loy has expanded her coverage area once again, acquiring the existing territory of Always Best Care of Greensboro and High Point, North Carolina. The agency has been successfully serving residents of Jamestown, Summerfield and Guilford Counties since 2020, and Loy looks forward to continuing to provide exceptional senior care services to these communities. Loy has been immersed in the Always Best Care business since 2012 when she began working at her mother's Burlington location, which is now Always Best Care of Alamance. When the opportunity arose to carry on the family business by purchasing that territory in 2017, she didn't think twice. In 2019, Loy expanded her territory by acquiring Always Best Care of Chapel Hill & Durham. Along the way, she has built a team of over 170 caregivers serving seniors throughout Central North Carolina. "Samantha has achieved impressive business growth in a short time and has done it while providing unparalleled service to her clients and a positive, caring work environment for her employees," said Jake Brown, CEO of Always Best Care Senior Services. "She is making a difference in the areas she serves, including ongoing support of local charitable organizations such as Meals on Wheels and the Alzheimer's Association. We look forward to seeing what she can accomplish next." Loy graduated from the University of North Carolina Greensboro and is happy to be back in her beloved college town. She said, "Owning a senior home care business is very rewarding; it's an honor to be able to care for and serve those in need in my communities. I'm looking forward to sharing our valuable caregiving resources and passion for helping others in one of my favorite cities." Always Best Care is one of the nation's leading providers of non-medical in-home care and assisted living referral services, with skilled home health care in limited markets. The company delivers its services through an international network of more than 225 independently owned and operated franchise territories throughout the United States and Canada. By working with case managers, social workers, discharge planners, doctors, and families, Always Best Care franchise owners provide affordable, comprehensive solutions that can be specifically matched to meet a client's particular physical or social needs. For a care evaluation or additional information on services available through Always Best Care of Greensboro and High Point, call 336-270-4352 or visit . About Always Best Care Founded in 1996, Always Best Care Senior Services is based on the belief that having the right people for the right level of care means peace of mind for the client and family. Always Best Care has been assisting seniors with a wide range of conditions and personal needs for over 25 years and currently provides thousands of hours of care every year. Always Best Care also offers exclusive programs such as Always in Touch, Balance Tracking System and remote patient monitoring. For more information regarding Always Best Care's solutions, visit . CONTACT: Nicole Hunnicutt Fish Consulting 404-558-4108 [email protected] SOURCE Always Best Care

Finding forming planets is a tough but important job for astronomers: Only three planets have ever been discovered caught in the process of forming, and the most recent of these was found just weeks ago. Finding forming planets is a tough but important job for astronomers: Only three planets have ever been discovered caught in the process of forming, and the most recent of these was found just weeks ago. Evan Rich, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, suggests that instead of looking for individual planets forming, astronomers might have better luck looking for the likely environments in which they form. In doing just that, Rich and a team of astronomers have found that systems with stars less than three solar masses are more likely to have large rings composed of tiny dust grains, about a micron in size -- potential indications of planet formation -- than larger stars and may have discovered a new planet around a very young star. Rich will present his findings, collected in the first summary paper produced from a survey called Gemini-Large Imaging with GPI Herbig/T-tauri Survey, or Gemini-LIGHTS, at the American Astronomical Society's annual meeting this month. His study has also been accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal. "It turns out that finding these planets in particular is very, very difficult," Rich said. "So we're taking the strategy of actually looking at the material itself rather than for the planet. "What is the environment of planet formation? What are the dynamics? How do these differentiate between a very low mass star compared to a very high mass star? Does the temperature of the star have an effect on the disk? One of the ultimate goals is to question how all these parameters affect planet formation." Rich and his research team used the Gemini South Telescope in Chile to look at stars more massive than the sun to to study how planet formation here might be different. Specifically, the team used the Gemini Planet Imager to view the objects in infrared light, or light slightly redder than our eyes can see. The astronomers also looked at these stars in polarized light in order to look for dim material such as dust next to the stars themselves. "The material we're looking at is sometimes a million times dimmer than the star itself, and using these processes allows us to see that dim material around very bright stars," Rich said. "What's happening is the light from the star is scattering off the dust, like when light from the sun reflects off the surface of a pond." What you see reflected off the surface of a pond is unpolarized light, which means its lightwaves are vibrating in all directions. Polarizing the light aligns its vibrations into a single plane. Similarly, when light from stars scatters off dust grains orbiting the stars, the astronomers can distinguish between the unpolarized light of the star and the unpolarized light from the dust, and can allow them to observe the dust grains in this protoplanetary disk. "In some ways, this is like using polarized sunglasses but instead of using the glasses to suppress the scattered light, we use it to enhance it," said co-author John Monnier, U-M professor of astronomy. The astronomers imaged 44 targets and detected some form of dust around 80% of them. The team released a gallery showing a range of different morphologies that tell the researchers about the dynamics happening within the disk itself. "It's truly incredible that we're at a point right now in astronomy where not only are we able to get images of planet-forming disks around young stars, but we can populate entire galleries to sort and study, reconstructing planetary origin stories," said Alicia Aarnio, assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, who led the target selection. "The theory is that when planets form, they make almost perfect tree rings going out from the sun," Rich said. "We think that if you see rings and gaps in the dust disk, there could be planets." The team has found so far that only systems with stars less than three solar masses have these rings. Stars above solar masses don't seem to have the same rings, and since these rings are a potential signature of planet formation, this could be a good indicator of where and how planets are forming. The researchers also saw a pattern in the stars without dust. "It was surprising to see that the presence of even a small companion to a host star, like a brown dwarf, dramatically reduced signs of ongoing planet formation," Monnier. This finding reinforces the idea that close binary stars seem to make planets less often than single stars, a result first proposed to explain data from the Kepler Space Telescope. The team found a host of objects orbiting the stars, including three brown dwarfs and one planetary-mass companion candidate just outside a planet-forming disk system, called V1295 Aql. This object appears to be about 13 times the mass of Jupiter, which puts it right on the edge between what's considered a planet or what's considered a brown dwarf star. If future observations confirm its orbit, it would be one of only a few known exoplanets around massive stars. "The dust rings, gaps and spiral arms seen by Gemini are telling us how and when planets form in real-time. With more accurate simulations and new telescopes like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Extremely Large Telescope, we are zeroing in on the key ingredients to understand how our solar system came to be," said Jaehan Bae, a planet formation theorist and former postdoctoral fellow and Ph.D. student at U-M, who is now an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Florida. The research team's observations were made at the International Gemini Observatory, a Program of the National Science Foundation's NOIRLab. Rich and Monnier acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation Division of Astronomical Sciences (NSF AST) 1830728. Co-author Aarnio acknowledges support from NSF AST-1311698. Co-author Stefan Kraus, professor of astrophysics at the University of Exeter and a former U-M research fellow, acknowledges support from a European Research Council Consolidator Grant, agreement ID 101003096.