Low Abundance of Three Tick Species in the Piedmont of North Carolina

Multiple species of ticks, including Ixodes scapularis (Say, Ixodida:Ixodidae), Amblyomma americanum (L., Ixodida:Ixodidae), and Dermacentor variabilis (Say, Ixodida:Ixodidae), occur in high and increasing abundance in both the northeast and southeast United States. North Carolina is at the nexus of spread of these species, with high occurrence and abundance of I. scapularis to the north and A. americanum to the south. Despite this, there are few records of these species in the Piedmont of North Carolina, including the greater Charlotte metropolitan area. Here, we update the known occurrence and abundance of these species in the North Carolina Piedmont. We surveyed for ticks using cloth drags, CO2 traps, and leaf litter samples at a total of 79 sites within five locations: Mecklenburg County, South Mountains State Park, Stone Mountain State Park, Duke Forest, and Morrow Mountain State Park, all in North Carolina, during the late spring, summer, and fall seasons of 2019. From these surveys, we had only 20 tick captures, illuminating the surprisingly low abundance of ticks in this region of North Carolina. Our results indicate the possibility of underlying habitat and host factors limiting tick distribution and abundance in the North Carolina Piedmont.

No evidence for insecticide resistance in a homogenous population of Aedes albopictus in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina

Aedes albopictus is a cosmopolitan mosquito species capable of transmitting arboviral diseases such as dengue, chikungunya, and Zika. To control this and similar species, public and private entities often rely on pyrethroid insecticides. Insecticide resistance status and physiological traits, such as body size, may contribute to local patterns of abundance, which is important for planning vector control. In this study, we genetically screened Ae. albopictus collected from June to August, 2017, in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, for mutations conferring pyrethroid resistance, and examined spatiotemporal patterns of specimen size, as measured by wing length. We hypothesized that size variation would be associated with factors found to influence abundance in similar populations of Ae. albopictus, and could therefore serve as a proxy measure. The genetic screening results indicated that known pyrethroid resistance alleles in two kdr regions are not present in this population. We detected no significant associations between wing length and socioeconomic and landscape factors, but mosquitoes collected in June had significantly longer wing length than in July or August. The lack of resistance indicators suggest that this population has not developed insecticide resistance via voltage-gated sodium channel mutations. The greater wing lengths in June are likely driven by meteorological patterns, suggesting that short-term weather cues may modulate morphological characteristics that, in turn, affect local fecundity and virus transmission potential.

Abstract 296: Quality Analysis of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation From Two Emergency Medical Service Systems Using a Feedback Device

Background: High quality cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) plays a critical role in the success of out-of-hospital resuscitation from sudden cardiac arrest (SCA). AHA guidelines provide protocol to achieve recommended targets for CPR quality metrics including chest compression fraction (CCF), percentage of chest compressions (CCs) with full chest recoil, CC rate and CC depth. Our objective was to report the CPR quality of two emergency medical services (EMS) agencies with different basic life support (BLS) CPR protocols. Methods: Data from 673 patients, 2015 to 2017, suffering out-of-hospital SCA were obtained from Philips FR3 AEDs. The Philips Q-CPR tool was used for real-time CPR feedback, and CC waveforms were recorded for retrospective CPR analysis using Philips Event Review Pro 5.0 and custom software. The two EMS systems had BLS protocol differences: Site 1(King County, WA, n = 93) applied a compression - ventilation ratio of 30:2, while Site 2 (Mecklenburg County, NC, n = 580) applied 200 compressions in each CPR interval and ventilations were performed during CCs. Analyses were performed comparing CPR metrics between sites and to AHA targets. Results: There were 3,460 minutes of resuscitation data analyzed, representing the initial phase of resuscitation prior to ALS. The proportion of cases with shocks was 21.5% (20 of 93) for site 1 and 16.9% (98 of 580) for site 2 (p = 0.3). Both sites achieved guideline metrics though there were statistical differences (Table 1). Compared to site 1, site 2 was associated with a higher CCF, faster CC rate, but less CC depth on average (p < 0.001). Conclusions: High quality CPR defined by AHA guidelines was achieved with both sites during the early phase of AED resuscitation though some differences were observed. Additional investigation should identify equipment, or rescuer characteristics that are important to consistently achieve high quality CPR and how the combination might be tailored to optimize individual patient outcome.

Foundations

This chapter details the histories of Gloria Richardson’s maternal and paternal families—the St. Clairs of Cambridge, Maryland, and the Hayeses of Mecklenburg County, Virginia—and reveals how they built financial wealth and used it to improve their lives and those of their fellow black people. These families stressed the importance of higher education and self-help organizations as means of improving their communities. The story of how Richardson’s parents met, and the black social network that made their connection possible, is a focus of this chapter. Richardson’s maternal grandfather, Herbert Maynadier St. Clair, receives special attention because of his important role in improving black people’s lives through his work as a Republican member of Cambridge’s City Council and his mentoring of Richardson.

A Novel Sampling Method to Measure Socioeconomic Drivers of Aedes Albopictus Distribution in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina

Climate change, urbanization, and globalization have facilitated the spread of Aedes mosquitoes into regions that were previously unsuitable, causing an increased threat of arbovirus transmission on a global scale. While numerous studies have addressed the urban ecology of Ae. albopictus, few have accounted for socioeconomic factors that affect their range in urban regions. Here we introduce an original sampling design for Ae. albopictus, that uses a spatial optimization process to identify urban collection sites based on both geographic parameters as well as the gradient of socioeconomic variables present in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, encompassing the city of Charlotte, a rapidly growing urban environment. We collected 3,645 specimens of Ae. albopictus (87% of total samples) across 12 weeks at the 90 optimized site locations and modelled the relationships between the abundance of gravid Ae. albopictus and a variety of neighborhood socioeconomic attributes as well as land cover characteristics. Our results demonstrate that the abundance of gravid Ae. albopictus is inversely related to the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood and directly related to both landscape heterogeneity as well as proportions of particular resident races/ethnicities. We present our results alongside a description of our novel sampling scheme and its usefulness as an approach to urban vector epidemiology. Additionally, we supply recommendations for future investigations into the socioeconomic determinants of vector-borne disease risk.

Regional Economic Analysis of Mecklenburg County, NC

Located in the state of North Carolina, Mecklenburg county is among the ten fastest growing counties in the Unites States (Carmen et al., 2010). As of 2010 census data the population of the county is 919,628, with an estimated population of 1,034,070 in 2015. The city of Charlotte, that covers the most area of Mecklenburg county, is the largest city in NC with close to 700,000 residents, and the seventeenth largest city in the US. Mecklenburg county is part of the NC-SC Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) of Charlotte, Concord, Gastonia.546 square miles (1,410 km2) of Mecklenburg county is land and 22 square miles (57 km2) is water (US Census Bureau). Adjacent counties include: Iredell county, Cabarrus county, Union county, Gaston county, Catawba county, Lincoln county, Lancaster county (SC), and York county (SC).Charlotte is home of a large banking industry and several Fortune 500 companies (Carmen et al., 2010). The banking industry makes Charlotte the second largest financial center in the US after New York and has one of the highest median wages in the region (Kozar, 2010). Another large industry in Charlotte is finance, insurance, and real estate, and the headquarters of several national corporations located in Charlotte (Bacot, 2008). Five Fortune 500 Companies that have their headquarters in Mecklenburg County are: Bank of America, Nucor, Sonic Automotive, Duke Energy, and Family Dollar (Dollar Tree) (Fortune, 2016). Education is another large economic sector in North Carolina due to having the largest public school system and a regional state university in this area (Bacot, 2008); these schools include: UNC Charlotte, Davidson College, Queens University, Johnson &amp; Wales University, Wake Forest University (School of Business) Charlotte Center, Johnson C. Smith University, Southern Evangelical Seminary, Central Piedmont Community College, and Belmont Abbey College. Other large employers in Mecklenburg county are Charlotte Mecklenburg Hospital, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, Wells Fargo Bank (A Corp), Bank of America, and US Air Inc (NC Department of Commerce, 2015, 4th quarter).Charlotte-Douglas International Airport is the main airport in the region that is the 5th busiest airport in the nation in 2015, and the 6th busiest in the world (Portillo, 2016). This airport is the hub for US Airways and American Airlines that have been merged in 2013, to become the second busiest hub for the combined carrier (Portillo, 2015). Charlotte, like other parts of the US, has been affected by the economic recession that started in 2007. Many job losses and unemployment expanded in all sectors of the economy. The banking industry that was the largest industry in the region was specifically affected by the recession, leaving the region with high unemployment (NC Department of Commerce, 2015, 4th quarter). However, one of the strongest assets of Charlotte economy is its diversity of employment, that even at the time of distress, would sustain its economy (Kozar, 2010).