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On Tuesday, Chair of the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force Rep. Mike Thompson (CA-05) commended Director Steve Dettelbach of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, for releasing guidance on the agency’s ghost gun rulemaking.
“Ghost guns are sought out by criminals and other people prohibited from purchasing a firearm because these untraceable weapons could be sold without a background check,” said Thompson. “I commend ATF Director Dettelbach for releasing a guidance letter to industry which will provide clarification about how the ghost gun rule will be enforced to ensure that frames and receivers have a serial number and require a background check to be sold.”
The ATF’s ghost gun guidance letter follows action by the House Gun Violence Prevention Task Force to urge the ATF to provide clear guidance and vigorously enforce the rule cracking down on the illegal sale of ghost guns.
Prior to the release of this guidance, some ghost gun retailers sought to evade the ghost gun rule by selling frames and receivers separate from the easily accessible tools and parts needed to complete the firearm.
In December, Chairman Thompson met with Director Dettelbach to discuss gun violence prevention issues including the implementation of the ghost gun rule.
In October Thompson led a letter to the ATF signed by 135 members of Congress on the ghost gun rule implementation. Read the letter here.
Read the ATF’s December 27, 2022 guidance letter below.
Over 90% of the world population has the virus that causes chickenpox lying dormant in their nervous system. Most people contract the varicella zoster virus, or VZV, when they get chickenpox as children. For around a third of these people, this same virus will reactivate years later and cause shingles, also called herpes zoster.
While most people are familiar with the painful rash that VZV causes for shingles, a wide spectrum of other complications can also occur even without visible skin symptoms. Among the most severe is stroke, in particular ischemic stroke, which occurs when the blood supply to the brain is restricted by narrowing arteries or blocked by a clot.
People with shingles have an approximately 80% higher risk of stroke than those without the disease, and this risk stays elevated for up to a year after the rash has resolved. Stroke risk is nearly doubled for those with the rash on their face, and tripled for those under the age of 40.
The mechanism behind this long-term stroke risk is mostly unknown. Some researchers have proposed that direct infection of the arteries may be the cause. However, some features of VZV infections suggest that this is not the full picture. A common theme of VZV infections is chronic inflammation that spreads beyond the original infection site, which can persist for weeks to months after the virus is no longer detectable and presumably dormant again.
I am a neurovirologist, and my lab studies how VZV contributes to neurological disorders such as stroke and dementia. In our recently published research, we found that VZV reactivation triggers the formation of cellular sacs, or exosomes, carrying proteins that contribute to blood clotting and inflammation. An increase in these proteins may lead to an increased risk in stroke.
Exosomes carry blood clotting proteins
Exosomes are small vesicles, or fluid-filled sacs, made inside cells throughout the body. They’re like duffle bags that carry cargo, such as proteins and nucleic acids, from the cell to distant tissues. Although critical for essential biological functions like communication between cells, exosomes can also play a key role in disease progression and are drug targets for many diseases.
We wanted to see whether shingles patients develop exosomes that carry proteins involved in blood clotting, increasing their risk of stroke. So we isolated exosomes from the blood of 13 patients at time of shingles rash and compared them to exosomes isolated from healthy donors.
When we analyzed the contents of these exosomes, we found that shingles patients had nine times higher levels of clotting proteins than healthy patients. Moreover, we found the exosomes of shingles patients still had elevated levels of these proteins three months after their initial rash.
To functionally confirm that the contents of these exosomes can induce clotting, we exposed platelets – cell fragments involved in blood clotting – of healthy people to exosomes from either shingles patients or healthy people. We found that exposing platelets to shingles exosomes triggered them to clump together and form aggregates with other types of blood cells, as they would in forming a blood clot.
These findings suggest that exosomes may be a potential mechanism for how the varicella zoster virus increases stroke risk for shingles patients.
Considering stroke with shingles
A Food and Drug Administration-approved vaccine to prevent shingles, Shingrix, is available for adults age 50 and older and immunocompromised adults age 18 and older. However, those at highest risk of stroke are under the age of 40 and are ineligible for Shingrix. A large group of these individuals were likely not vaccinated for chickenpox as children, as the chickenpox vaccine was only approved in the U.S. in 1995 and uptake by adults was quite low at the time. While vaccination with the chickenpox vaccine significantly reduces the risk of shingles, it is still possible for a latent infection to reactivate and cause the disease.
While our study provides evidence for a potential way that shingles can cause an increased risk of stroke during and soon after infection, further research on how long this risk persists is needed. We are conducting follow-up studies to evaluate how long patients may have an increased tendency to form blood clots after their shingles infection has resolved. These longitudinal studies will also examine whether exosomes can be used as a biomarker to monitor stroke risk after shingles.
Meanwhile, we hope that our findings may provide a potential target for treatment development, and encourage people to get vaccinated for shingles.
Andrew Bubak, Assistant Research Professor of Neurology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The California Highway Patrol’s Clear Lake Area office did not release the name of the 58-year-old man, and the Lake County Sheriff’s Office was in the process on Tuesday afternoon of notifying the man’s family.
The CHP’s Tuesday afternoon report said the crash occurred at 3:15 a.m Tuesday.
The driver was in a 2015 Chevrolet Trax SUV traveling westbound on Highway 281 east of Konocti Bay Road at an unknown rate of speed, the CHP said.
The report also noted the wet and rainy conditions at the time of the wreck. Overnight, heavy rain occurred throughout Lake County.
For unknown reasons, the CHP said the driver unsafely turned and allowed his vehicle to travel off the south road edge of Highway 281.
As a result, the SUV crashed into an uphill dirt/grass embankment and overturned, the CHP said.
The CHP said the driver, who was not wearing a seat belt, was partially ejected during the crash and succumbed to his injuries at the scene.
The crash is still under investigation and it is unknown if alcohol or drugs contributed to the collision, the CHP reported.
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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Yuba Community College District has selected the next dean of Woodland Community College’s Lake County Campus.
The district board unanimously voted to approve the appointment of Ingrid Larsen at its Dec. 15 meeting.
Larsen has worked as an academic counselor and instructor for college success skills at the Lake County Campus since 2016, according to a college profile.
She will succeed Dr. Annette Lee, who served as dean on an interim basis since July, after the departure of Dr. Cirilo Cortez.
The contract with Larsen that the board approved — signed by her and interim Chancellor James Houpis on Nov. 30 — runs from Dec. 31 to June 30, 2024.
She will receive a base salary of $115,446 per year based on the Yuba Community College District 2021-2022 Management Salary Schedule, Range 37, Step 4.
Larsen holds a Bachelor of Science in health science from California State University, Chico, and a Master of Arts in counseling with a Pupil Personnel Credential from Sonoma State University. She also studied at Florida Institute of Technology in behavior analysis.
Larsen’s college profile page says she started her career pathway working with victims of crime and supporting health education. She’s worked as an educator in Lake County’s kindergarten through high school system, credentialed counselor and behavior analyst. She also has been adjunct disability resources counselor for Mendocino College.
At Woodland Community College, she has worked with the Lake County Extended Opportunity Program & Services, or EOPS/CARE, and CalWORKs programs.
She loves the outdoors and enjoys hiking, paddleboarding, camping and photography, according to her faculty profile.
In other news, the district board held its annual organizational meeting at the same time as the regular Dec. 15 meeting, appointing Juan Delgado as board president, Susan Alves as board vice president and Jesse Ortiz as board clerk for 2023.
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Overnight, about 2 inches of rain fell along the Northshore and other parts of the county.
The rain led to road issues. Shortly after 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, there was a report of a tree and power poles sheared off on the side of Bottle Rock Road near Penson Court, with a few boulders also in the roadway.
About an hour later, there were reports of mud, dirt and rocks in the roadway at Highway 29 and Highway 175 in Middletown.
The National Weather Service continues to estimate that several more inches of rain could fall through the rest of this week, before a forecasted break in the rain on New Year’s Day.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
Last month was another unusually warm month, as the planet saw its ninth-warmest November on record.
Looking at the Arctic and Antarctic, both poles had their top-10 lowest November sea ice coverage on record.
Below are more highlights from NOAA’s November global climate report:
Climate by the numbers
November 2022
The average global land and ocean surface temperature for November 2022 was 1.37 degrees F (0.76 of a degree C) above the 20th-century average. This ranks as the ninth-warmest November in 143 years, but the coolest November since 2014.
November 2022 marked the 46th consecutive November and the 455th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average.
Europe tied 2000 for its third-warmest November on record. South America, Asia and Africa each had a November that ranked among their 20 warmest on record. North America had a warmer-than-average November, but it did not rank among its top-20 warmest.
Season (September through November) and year to date
The season (meteorological spring or autumn, depending on the hemisphere) saw an average global land and ocean temperature of 1.51 degrees F (0.84 of a degree C) above the average of 57.1 degrees F (14 degrees C). This ties with September through November of 2016 and 2018 as the fifth-warmest such season in the climate record.
The year to date (YTD, January through November) global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.55 degrees F (0.86 of a degree C) above the 20th-century average, making it the sixth-warmest YTD on record.
According to NCEI’s Global Annual Temperature Rankings Outlook, there is a greater than 99% chance that 2022 will rank among the 10-warmest years on record but a less than 1% chance that it will rank among the top five.
Other notable climate events
• Polar sea ice coverage was among the top-five lowest: Globally, November 2022 saw the fourth-lowest November sea ice extent (coverage) on record. Arctic sea ice extent in November averaged 3.75 million square miles, which is about 165,000 square miles below the 1991-2020 average. This marks the eighth-smallest November extent in the 44-year record. The Antarctic sea ice extent ranked fifth smallest on record at 5.81 million square miles, or about 313,000 square miles below the 1991-2020 average.
• Six named tropical storms formed in November: Of those six, four reached tropical cyclone strength (74 mph winds or higher), but none reached major tropical cyclone strength (111 mph winds or higher). The North Atlantic, with three hurricanes, was more active than normal during November. The West Pacific had below average activity for the month with two named storms, including one typhoon. No storms were active in the East Pacific during November for the first time since 2017.